We analyze the incentives of a controlling shareholder of a firm to acquire, directly or indirectly through his firm, shares in a competitor. We charaterize the conditions under which these partial acquisitions as well as the equilibrium toehold and its nature: controlling or silent. We find...

We analyze the incentives of a controlling shareholder of a firm to acquire, directly or indirectly through his firm, shares in a competitor. We charaterize the conditions under which these partial acquisitions as well as the equilibrium toehold and its nature: controlling or silent. We find...

We consider a simple general equilibrium model with imperfect competition. Firms are price taker in the input market and compete à la Cournot in some or all of the product markets (their technology displays constant returns to scale). We show that an increase in the number of firms does not...

This paper considers the information systems induced by auditing policies in a principal-agent model with moral hazard. We point out that two such information systems A and B are seldom comparable using the customary mean-preserving spread relation between their respective likelihood ratio...

We analyze the efficiency properties of the negligence rule with liability insurance, when the tort-feasor's behavior is imperfectly observable both by the insurer and the court. Efficiency is shown to depend on the extent to which the evidence is informative, on the evidentiary standard for...

We first point out that, using any of the current criteria for comparing information systems in principal-agent models with moral hazard (such as Kim (1994)'s criterion), it is often impossible to contrast the value of information obtained from different policies of contingent audits that bear...