We consider the agency problem of a staff member managing microfinancing programs, who can abuse his discretion to embezzle borrowers' repayments. The fact that most borrowers of microfinancing programs are illiterate and live in rural areas where transportation costs are very high make staff's...

Site licensing of electronic journals has been revolutionizing the way academic information is distributed. However, many librarians are concerned about the possibility that commercial publishers might abuse site licensing by practicing bundling. In this paper, we analyze how bundling afects...

The traditional theory of second-degree price discrimination tackles individual self selection but does not address the possibility that buyers could form a coalition to conduct arbitrage, that is, to coordinate their purchases and to reallocate the goods. In this paper, we design the optimal...

This paper considers a monopolist selling two objects to a single buyer with privately observed valuations. We prove that if each buyer’s type has a non-negative virtual valuation for each object, then the optimal price schedule is such that the objects are sold only in a bundle; weaker...

We study the optimal mechanism for downsizing the public sector which takes into account different informational constraints (complete versus asymmetric information on each workers efficiency) and political constraints (mandatory versus voluntary downsizing). Under complete information, the...

We study a retail benchmarking approach to determine access prices for interconnected networks. Instead of considering fixed access charges as in the existing literature, we study access pricing rules that determine the access price that network i pays to network j as a linear function of the...

Obtaining information about changes in market conditions is vital for the survival of the firms operating in a changing environment. In this paper, we offer a theory of information flows in a setting in which the principal faces a project choice and needs to induce the agent, who is responsible...

In this paper, we study how access pricing affects network competition when subscription demand is elastic and each network uses non-linear prices and can apply termination-based price discrimination. In the case of a fixed per minute termination charge, we find that a reduction of the...

I study the optimal project choice when the principal relies on the agent in charge of production for project evaluation. The principal has to choose between a safe project generating a fixed revenue and a risky project generating an uncertain revenue. The agent has private information about the...

This paper studies how firms make layoff decisions in the presence of adverse shocks. In this uncertain environment, workers' expectations about their job security affect their on-the-job performance. This productivity effect of job insecurity forces firms to strike a balance between laying off...