We investigate the terms of exchange between the legislative branch of the government and an administrative bureau with standard operating procedures. An administrative bureau is a not-for-profit public organisation responsible for the production of a non-marketable good. Such a bureau is...

Given wide scope for asymmetric information in huge hierarchies agents have a large capacity for opportunistic behaviour. Hidden actions increase transactions costs and cause the demand for monitoring and enforcement. Once the latter are costly, this raises questions about their scope, logistics...

A robust finding of repeated public goods experiments is that high initial contribution rates sharply decline towards the end. This paper reports on an exploratory experiment designed to discover whether such a decline is simply triggered by the usual experimental practice of publicly informing...

We examine the effects of di¤erences in social capital on first and second best transfers to families with children, in an asym- metric information context where the number of births, and the future earning capacity of each child that is born, are random variables. The probability that a couple...

The paper constructs a search-theoretic model of credit markets with a bilateral trading mechanism that enables the manageable introduction of asymmetric information. Borrowers´ success probabilities are unobservable to financiers, but the degree of risk in observable projects can be used as a...

Efficient regulation of the commons requires information about the regulated firms that is rarely available to regulators (e.g., cost of pollution abatement). Montero (2008) proposes a simple mechanism for inducing firms to truthfully reveal their privat

Under contingent fees the attorney gets a share of the judgement; under conditional fees the lawyer gets an upscale premium if the case is won which is, however, unrelated to the adjudicated amount. We compare conditional and contingent fees in a framework where lawyers are uninformed about the...

We consider resource allocation within an organisation when agents have a preference for autonomy and show how delegation bears on moral hazard and adverse selection. Agents may care about autonomy for reasons of job-satisfaction, status or greater reputation of perform-ance under autonomy....

This paper examines the problem of how to design incentive-compatible mechanisms in environments in which the agents' private information evolves stochastically over time and in which decisions have to be made in each period. The environments we consider are fairly general in that the agents'...