A principal wants two sequential tasks to be performed by wealth-constrained agents. Suppose that there is an outcome externality; i.e., a first-stage success can make second-stage effort more or less effective. If the tasks are conflicting, the principal's profit-maximizing way to induce high...

We find that asymmetric information is important for the uptake of supplementary private health insurance and health care utilization. We use dynamic panel data models to investigate the sources of asymmetric information and distinguish short-run selection effects into insurance from long-run...

We study a multi-task principal-agent problem in which tasks can be in direct conflict with each other. In theory, it is difficult to induce a single agent to exert efforts in two conflicting tasks, because effort in one task decreases the success probability of the other task. We have conducted...