The 2016 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their work on contract theory. Contract theory is a subfield of game theory where the conflict between the owner - the principal - and the CEO - or agent - is at the centre of interest. In the...

The 2016 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Oliver Hart and Bengt Holmström for their work on contract theory. Contract theory is a subfield of game theory where the conflict between the owner - the principal - and the CEO - or agent - is at the centre of interest. In the...

Also published as DFAE-II Working Paper 2002-26 and as an article in: Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 2004, vol. 28, issue 11, pages 2297-2325

It is a highly disputed question in the literature how state subsidy influences the behavior of the entrepreneurs and accordingly the growth prospects of the economy. Most authors agree that state intervention in financing deteriorates the incentives of the entrepreneur, but there is no...

It is a highly disputed question in the literature how state subsidy influences the behavior of the entrepreneurs and accordingly the growth prospects of the economy. Most authors agree that state intervention in financing deteriorates the incentives of the entrepreneur, but there is no...

Economic decisions have been shown to depend on actual outcomes as well as perceived intentions. In this paper, we examine whether and how the relative importance of outcomes or intentions for economic decision develops with age. We report the result of ultimatum games with children, teens and...

We consider a pure exchange economy under uncertainty in which the traders have the non-partition structure of information. They willing to trade the amounts of state-contingent commodities and they know their own expectations. Common knowledge of these conditions among all the traders can...

Given that young children are under the control of their parents, if the government has a interest in either the welfare or the productivity of the former, it has no option but to act through the latter,. Parents are, in the ordynary sense....

This paper is about freedom of choice and rigidity of choice rules as incentive devices. We study the optimal design of an agent's freedom of choice when his information is endogenous and costly to acquire. We show that curtailing the agent's authority over decision-making may be optimal even if...