This paper examines asymmetric information in the life insurance market using data that link life insurance holdings with death records for a representative sample of purchasers. This analysis finds no compelling evidence for adverse selection in a broad age cohort.

This paper shows that positive correlation between project outcomes may improve the efficiency of microfinance group lending contracts.

We consider an adverse selection model in which the agent can gather private information before the principal offers the contract. In scenario I, information gathering is a hidden action, while in scenario II, it is observable. We study how the two scenarios differ. Specifically, the principal...

Using a within-student analysis, we find no average impact of textbook access (ownership or sharing) on primary school achievement. Instead, it is only for students with high socioeconomic status that one form of textbook access–sharing–has a positive impact.

When penalties for first-time offenders are restricted, it is typically optimal for the lawmaker to overdeter repeat offenders. First-time offenders are then deterred not only by the (restricted) fine for a first offense, but also by the prospect of a large fine for a subsequent offense. Now...

Testing for asymmetric information in insurance markets has become a very important issue in the empirical literature in the last years. We analyze the (private) accident insurance, which has not been analyzed before in the literature, but covers one of the most important risks faced by...

We provide extensions of the Bulow and Klemperer (1996) result when the seller has value for the object above the minimum value of the buyers. The result may fail. We show that the seller does better with more participation and some exclusion than the optimal exclusion of buyers of low value...

I show that bargaining impasse in Hörner and Vieille (2009) can be interpreted as the limit of bargaining delay: the maximal duration of the game increases unboundedly as the seller’s discount factor approaches the threshold level above which bargaining impasse occurs.

We establish the effort-maximizing rule of allocating heterogeneous prizes when contestants privately observe their effort efficiencies. With ex ante symmetric players and increasing virtual effort efficiency, an all pay auction maximizes the total expected effort.

We show that in a standard symmetric Cournot duopoly with unknown demand, the optimal information disclosure policy of an informed benevolent planner is to fully inform one of the duopolists and disclose no information to the other one. We discuss possible extensions of the result.