In the model there are two types of financial auditors with identical technology, one of which is endowed with a prior reputation for honesty. We characterize conditions under which there exists a "two-tier equilibrium" in which "reputable" auditors refuse bribes offered by clients for fear of...

This paper addresses the question, what metrics should be used for performance evaluation and in particular how they should be weighted and combined in the presence of technological interdependencies when the agents exhibit variedly strong developed rivalry. We find that the principal reacts to...

This paper analyzes the impact of heterogeneous (social) preferences on the weighting and combination of performance measures as well as on a firm’s profitability. We consider rivalry, egoism and altruism as extreme forms within the continuum of possible preferences and show that the principal...

When designing incentives for a manager, the trade-off between insuranceand a “good” allocation of effort across various tasks is oftenidentified with a trade-off between the responsiveness (sensitivity, precision,signal-noise ratio) of the performance measure and its similarity(congruity,...

In early 2019, the stock prices of the German company Wirecard AG experienced market turmoil after several critical reports on activities claimed to be illegal. To analyze the market impact of news, we use stock price data for Wirecard AG and apply the reversed news model. We elaborate on...

stock market crash on hedging strategies by portfolio insurers, which dictated selling stocks as soon as prices fell. The fact that the practice of buying and selling stocks as portfolio insurance has virtually disappeared since then has given many comfort that a replay of the 1987 crash, when...

This note analyses investment and risk-taking in a simple agency model of public regulation/procurement borrowed from Laffont & Tirole (1993). We show that the principal will overinvest or underinvest depending on whether investment is marginally more productive in bad or in good states. Due to...

Crowdfunding provides innovation in enabling entrepreneurs to contract with consumers before investment. Under aggregate demand uncertainty, this improves screening for valuable projects. Entrepreneurial moral hazard and private cost information threatens this benefit. Crowdfunding's...

In markets with quality unobservable to buyers, third-party certification is often the only instrument to increase transparency. While both sellers and buyers have a demand for certification, its role differs fundamentally: sellers use it for signaling, buyers use it for inspection. Seller...

We study monopoly and duopoly pricing in a two-sided market with dispersed information about users' preferences. First, we show how the dispersion of information introduces idiosyncratic uncertainty about participation rates and how the latter shapes the elasticity of the demands and thereby the...