En 2011, le marché postal sera entièrement libéralisé. Le service universel sera-t-il maintenu ? Comment sera-t-il financé ? Dans cet article, nous abordons la question du financement du service universel postal dans un environnement concurrentiel. La Commission européenne propose...

La Commission européenne vient de décider d’ouvrir d’ici 2010 l’ensemble du marché ferroviaire à la concurrence. À l’avenir, la SNCB ne sera plus la seule compagnie à transporter des passagers dans notre pays. Dans ce numéro de Regards économiques, nous analysons au travers de...

En Wallonie, la collecte des déchets est fréquemment déléguée par les communes à une intercommunale ou à un collecteur privé. Par ailleurs, de plus en plus de communes utilisent des conteneurs à puce. Cet article compare les performances en termes de coûts de ces différentes alternatives

This paper addresses the question of delegation in an organization where there is an initial asymmetry of information between the principal and the agent. We assume that the principal cannot use revelation techniques à la Baron Myerson to elicit agent's superior information and in contrast, we...

This article studies the problem of regulating a monopolist with unknown marginal cost. The problem described differs from Baron and Myerson [1982] because we suppose that the regulator faces a cash-in-advance constraint. The introduction of such a constraint may lead to the collapse of the...

This paper concentrates on the question of organizational design under asymmetric information. The design of the organization has two parts: first, communication channels between the members should be established and second, the tasks should be allocated to the party that performs it in the most...

This paper investigates the role of output quality control in a multi agent setting with moral hazard. The principal is in charge of a team of agents who produce the output. The marketing of this output can be either a success or entail huge losses. At the time of marketing the product, the...

In this paper we explain the apparent "diversification discount” of conglomerates without assuming inefficient-cross subsidisation through internal capital markets. Instead we assume that internal capital market efficiently redistributes scare resources across a conglomerate’s divisions...

This paper examines how domestic violence may be used as an instrument to extract large transfers from a spouse's family. It is based on a case-study of three villages in Southern India, conducted by the authors, that combines qualitative and survey data. Based on the ethnographic evidence, we...

We examine the determinants of expenditures on wedding celebrations by rural Indian families. Fieldwork, using open-ended interviews and focus group discussions in two villages in Karnataka State in Southern India, suggests that wedding celebrations are to a large extent a signal of social...