The "puzzle" of blackmail is that threats to reveal private information that would be harmful to someone in exchange for money are illegal, but revelation is not. The resolution is that concealment of information about product quality impedes the efficient operation of markets, whereas...

This paper studies a principal-agent relationship in a contractual crime setting. Suppose an agent and a principal sign a contract stipulating some transfer of funds from one player (say the agent) to the next (the principal) contingent on the state of the world announced by the first player. In...

In this paper we explore the possibility that individuals may select insurance coverage in part based on their anticipated behavioral response to the insurance contract. Such "selection on moral hazard" can have important implications for attempts to combat either selection or moral hazard. We...

We provide an illustration of how standard consumer and producer theory can be used to quantify the welfare loss associated with inefficient pricing in insurance markets with selection. We then show how this welfare loss can be estimated empirically using identifying variation in the price of...

Contract-relevant information asymmetries are known to cause inefficien-cies in markets. The information asymmetry is largest in the beginning of the customer-insurer relationship but reduces over time; the longer a poli-cyholder stays with the insurer the more the insurer learns about the...

Contract relevant information asymmetries are known to cause inefficiencies in markets. The information asymmetry is largest in the beginning of the customer insurer relationship but reduces over time; the longer a policyholder stays with the insurer the more the insurer learns about the...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...

The empirical evidence of adverse selection in insurance markets is mixed. The problem in assessing the extent of adverse selection is that private information, on which agents act, is generally unobservable to the researcher, which makes it difficult to distinguish between adverse selection and...

For the principal-agent problem with moral hazard and adverse selection we establish that within the collection of all measurable, deterministic contracting mechanisms satisfying the individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints there exists one that is optimal for a risk averse...

We study imperfect competition between insurers in a multiple-risk environment. In the absence of asymmetric information, equilibria are efficient, and we determine the degrees of specialization under which the specialized insurers are able or unable to capture the surplus. We show in contrast...