Public service motivation is often considered as an argument for low- powered incentive schemes in the public sector. In this paper, we characterize the optimal contract between a public regulator and an altruistic agent according to the degree of public service motivation, when the type of the...

Purpose – This paper focuses on the decision by firms to commit and to invest unilaterally. It is concerned with the intriguing question as to whether unilateral commitments are mechanisms that help a firm manage risks in alliance relationships in a proactive manner....

Strategic alliances are characterized by inherent instability arising from uncertainty regarding a partner’s future behaviour and the absence of a higher authority to ensure compliance. Consequently, when firms adopt these strategies, they are confronted with a relational risk. This paper...

This article shows how management consultant’s daily transgression practices favour semi-confidential information diffusion, which has the effect of improving managers’ strategic decision making. By their marginal transgressions (namely confidentiality rule breaking), consultants act as...

We study comparative statics of Nth-degree risk increases within a large class of problems that involve bidimensional payoffs and additive or multiplicative risks. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for unambiguous impact of Nth-degree risk increases on optimal decision making. We...

The article determines which conflict resolution mechanisms are constructive and which are destructive, through analysing contractual agreements in European biotechnology enterprises. In the article, the term mechanism is used to refer to tools or the way in which conflicts are resolved....

This paper deals with risk-sharing problems between many agents, each of whom having a strictly concave law invariant utility. In the special case where every agent's utility is given by a concave integral functional of the quantile of her individual endowment, we fully characterize the optimal...

We consider a simple model of lending and borrowing combining two informational problems: adverse selection and costly state verification. Our analysis highlights the interaction between these two informational problems. We notably show that the higher the monitoring cost, the less...