When do principals independently choose to share the information obtained from their privately informed agents? Information sharing affects contracting within competing organizations and induces agents’ strategies to be correlated through the distortions imposed by principals to obtain...

Motivated by the recent experimental evidence on altruistic behavior, we study a simple principal-agent model where each player cares about other players’ utility, and may reciprocate their attitude towards him. We show that, relative to the selfish benchmark, efficiency improves when players...

We study a Bertrand game where two sellers supplying products of different and unverifiable qualities can outwit potential clients through (costly) deceptive advertising. We characterize a class of pooling equilibria where sellers post the same price regardless of their quality and low quality...

We study a supply chain model where competing manufacturers located around a circle contract with privately informed and exclusive retailers. The number of brands in the market (determined by the manufacturers’ zero profit condition) depends on the level of asymmetric information within supply...

We study a model of financial advice where investors rely on a financial expert (the advisor) to make their asset allocation choices. There is only one source of risk and the advisor is privately informed about the volatility of the return of the risky asset. Moreover, the advisor’s...

We propose a theory of anticompetitive effects of debt finance based on the interaction between capital structure, managerial incentives, and firms ability to sustain collusive agreements. Shareholders' commitments not to expropriate debtholders through managers with valuable reputations or...

We develop a theory of the emergence of merchant guilds as an efficient mechanism to implement collusion among merchants and rulers, building on the natural complementarity between merchants’ market trading and mutual monitoring. Unlike the seminal paper in the existing literature, we focus...

In a dynamic game between N retailers and a large number of suppliers, I show that inefficient contracting emerges as a mechanism to implement collusion among retailers, building on the natural ‘complementarity’ between retail and wholesale prices. When efficient collusion is not...

Since 1991 the Italian Legislator grants amnesties, protection and even economic bene.ts to former mobsters cooperating with the justice. These incentives were intro- duced to break down omertà. What is the economic logic behind this policy? Did the program succeed? To address these issues we...

We study Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) in a successive monopolies framework with adverse selection and moral hazard. The analysis compares both the private and the wel- fare properties of vertical contracts based on retail price restrictions with those derived under quantity .xing arrangements...