In this paper, we provide an altruistic interpretation to the Blanchard (1985) perpetual youth model and examine under which conditions such interpretation holds. Unlike the standard model, the modified model essentially requires no insurance and a bequest nonnegativity constraint.

A contestant’s effort depends on her knowledge of her rival’s type. This knowledge is often limited in real-life contests. We propose a model where the principal of a contest has commitment power to verifiably disclose contestants’ types. We investigate the optimal disclosure policy to...

This note investigates the effects of introducing a transaction tax ondepth and bid-ask spread using a static model where a competitive market makerfaces informed and liquidity traders. When the degree of information asymmetryis low, an increase in the transaction tax can result into a smaller...

Nowadays many employers offer their employees the possibility of an insurance against too large losses in income when retiring or becoming disabled. This paper models the optimization problem of the employer when setting up such a so-called pension fund. Not surprisingly, it turns out that the...

The paper analyzes a two period general equilibrium model with individual risk, aggregate uncertainty and moral hazard. There is a large number of households, each facing two individual states of nature in the second period. These states differ solely in the household's vector of initial...

The paper extends Diamond's (1984) analysis of financial contracting with information asymmetry ex post and endogenous "bankruptcy penalties" to allow for risk aversion of the borrower. The optimality of debt contracts, which Diamond obtained for the case of risk neutrality, is shown to be...

Serizawa [3] characterized the set of strategy-proof, individually rational, no exploitative, and non-bossy social choice functions in economies with pure public goods. He left an open question whether non-bossiness is necessary for his characterization. We will prove that non-bossiness is...

This article analyzes the two wise girls puzzle, which is a simpler variant of the so-called three wise men puzzle, with some proof-theoretic tools. We formulate the puzzle in an epistemic logic. Our chief assumption is that the reasoning ability of each player of the puzzle is equivalent to...

In a game with rational expectations, individuals simultaneously refine their information with the information revealed by the strategies of other individuals. At a Nash equilibrium of a game with rational expectations, the information of individuals is essentially symmetric: the same profile of...

The first-order approach is a technical shortcut widely used in agency problems. The best known set of sufficient conditions for its validity are due to Mirrlees and Rogerson and require that the distribution function is convex in effort and has a likelihood ratio increasing in output. Only one...