In a pioneering approach towards the explanation of the phenomenon of "yes man" behavior in organizations, Prendergast (1993) argued that incentive contracts in employment relationships generally make a worker distort his privately acquired information. This would imply that there is a trade-off...

This paper offers a non-technical discussion of the literature on the theoretical foundations of the incomplete contracting approach.

In this paper we discuss "lock in effects" and "hold-up problems" (which occur when relationship-specific investments are sunk).

We consider symmetric rent-seeking contests with independent private valuations of the contest prize. For a two-parameter specification with continuous types, we fully characterize the Bayesian equilibrium, and study its basic properties. The willingness to waste is a hump-shaped function of the...

This paper identifies simple conditions for monotone comparative statics of a unique equilibrium in the Akerlof-Wilson model. Separate conditions apply to trade volume and price. Trade volume increases when supply becomes both stronger and more elastic. In contrast, price decreases when supply...

This paper contributes to the existing literature on central bank repo auctions. It is based on a structural econometric approach, whereby the primitives of bidding behavior (individual bid schedules and bid-shading components) are directly estimated. With the estimated parameters we calibrate a...

Among the most puzzling observations on the euro money market are the discount in the weekly refinancing operations, the more aggressive bidding under uncertainty, the temporary flatness of bid schedules, and the development of interest rate spreads. To explain these observations, we consider a...

The Milgrom-Shannon single crossing property is essential for monotone comparative statics of optimization problems and noncooperative games. This paper formulates conditions for an additively separable objective function to satisfy the single crossing property. One component of the objective...

In competitive procurement auctions, bids often have the form of unit-price contracts (UPCs). We show that optimal bidding behavior in UPC auctions is typically nonmonotonic and therefore may lead to inefficient allocations. However, UPC auctions may still be desirable for the buyer when...