This contribution starts out by noting a conflict of interest between consumers and insurers. Consumers face positive correlation in their assets (health, wealth, wisdom, i.e. skills), causing them to demand a great deal of insurance coverage. Insurers on the other hand eschew positively...

This paper theoretically investigates how labor-market tightness affects market outcomes if firms use informal and self-enforcing agreements to motivate workers. We characterize profit-maximizing equilibria and derive the following results. First, an increase in the supply of homogenous workers...

In a continuous-time setting, we study the design of a dynamic contract between a government and a private entity, wherein the latter commits to pay the government in return for the exclusive right to sell a service by operating a public facility. Private revenues are modelled as depending on...

I consider a neoclassical growth model with endogenous labor supply in which agents have private information about their idiosyncratic value of leisure. A key assumption is that these shocks follow a persistent stochastic process over time. For this economy I solve the economy-wide mechanism...

We examine a 'Rotten Kid' model (Becker 1974) where a player with social preferences interacts with an egoistic player. We assume that social preferences are intentionbased rather than outcome-based. In a very general multi-stage setting we show that any equilibrium must involve mutually unkind...

Previous experimental work provides encouraging support for some of the central assumptions underlying Hart and Moore (2008)'s theory of contractual reference points. However, existing studies ignore realistic aspects of trading relationships such as informal agreements and expost renegotiation....

Employment contracts give a principal the authority to decide flexibly which task his agent should execute. However, there is a tradeoff, first pointed out by Simon (1951), between flexibility and employer moral hazard. An employment contract allows the principal to adjust the task quickly to...

Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

We introduce intention-based social preferences into a Bayesian mechanism design framework. We first show that, under common knowledge of social preferences, any tension between material efficiency, incentive compatibility, and voluntary participation can be resolved. Hence, famous impossibility...

We consider a long-term contractual relationship in which a buyer procures a fixed quantity of a product from a supplier and then sells it on the market. The production cost is private information and evolves randomly over time. The solution to this dynamic principal-agent problem involves a...