Electronic commerce and flexible manufacturing allow personalization of initially standardized products at low cost. Will customers provide the information necessary for personalization? Assuming that a consumer can control the amount of information revealed, we analyze how his decision...

Partial ownership can be used as a screening device by a foreign firm which wants to merge with a local firm whose productivity is private information. As partial ownership is confined to sharing future merger profits, it cannot achieve complete separation in all cases but improves expected...

A principal provides budgets to agents (e.g., divisions of a firm or the principal’s children) whose expenditures provide her benefits, either materially or because of altruism. Only agents know their potential to generate benefits. We prove that if the more “productive” agents are also...

Much insider trading literature focuses on the redistribution of monetary rents. This focus has led to ambiguous and conflicting results, unable to identify who the clear winners and losers of insider trading legislation are. Lacking any clearly defined beneficiary, an analysis of the origins...

If the defendant in a lawsuit is better informed than the plaintiff about the value of damages that could potentially be assigned by the court, biasing the burden of proof toward the plaintiff may lower aggregate efficiency losses from litigation. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012

We study a model of imperfectly discriminating contests with two ex ante symmetric agents. We consider four institutional settings: Contestants move either sequentially or simultaneously and in addition their types are either public or private information. We find that an effort-maximizing...

Many new web-based services are introduced as free services. Depending on the seller’s business model, some remain free in the long run, while others switch to pay mode at some point in time. I characterize the relation between buyers and a new service seller when the former are uncertain...

The objective of this article is to analyze European railways’ incentives to improve efficiency in the recent liberalization context. We build and estimate a structural model accounting for regulatory pressures faced by the firms. Our model includes demand equations, capacity constraints and a...

In this article, a dynamic Principal–Agent model with discrete actions is analysed from a Multi-Objective optimization framework. As a result, a concave Pareto Frontier is numerically approximated. The concavity of the Pareto Frontier is a consequence of the information asymmetry between the...

Surveys can increase market transparency when information asymmetries are present—but this will only happen when respondents answer questions truthfully. Sometimes, however, it might not be in the respondents’ best interest to provide truthful information on their firm or market. This will...