A main prediction of agency theory is the well known risk-incentive trade-off. Incentive contracts should be found in environments with little uncertainty and for agents with low degrees of risk aversion. There is an ongoing debate in the literature about the first trade-off. Due to lack of...

In economic approaches it is often argued that reputation considerations influence the behavior of individuals or firms and that reputation influences the outcome of markets. Empirical evidence is rare though. In this contribution we argue that a positive reputation of sellers should have an...

This paper analyses management style as a governance mechanism in agency relationships when the lack of verifiable information restricts the contracting possibilities. Specifically, it investigates whether decision making should be supplemented by prior verification, and how these tasks should...

This paper analyses the relative efficiency of internal and external monitors. It confirms the intuition that, if the principal and her employees share aligned interests, internal monitoring is superior to external monitoring; vice versa if interests diverge. This result is not robust for two...

J.M. Grandmont claims in his paper "Transformations of the Commodity Space, Behavioral Heterogeneity, and the Aggregation Problem" (1992) to model "behavioral heterogeneity". By a specific parametrization he defines a subset of all demand functions and assumes that the distribution of the...

In a general setting of private information, the possibility (impossibility) theorem is said to be valid, if a balanced and ex post efficient mechanism exists (does not exist) which agents voluntarily participate at. Possibility and impossibility results are called robust if they hold for all...

In this note we consider the problem whether contingent commodity allocations can be used when the states are not directly contractible. In such a setting a contingent commodity allocation takes the form of a social choice function, and the question is whether this function is implementable (in...

Quasimonotone individual demand correspondences are characterized as those which can be rationalized (in a weak sense) by a complete, upper continuous, monotone, and convex preference relation. Moreover, it is shown that an arbitrary set of demand observations can be rationalized by a reflexive,...

This paper develops a model of political consensus in order to explain the missing link between inequality and political redistribution. Political consensu s is an implicit agreement not to vote for extreme policy proposals. We show tha t such an agreement may play an efficiency-enhancing role....