Inter-firm R&D collaborations through contractual arrangements have become increasingly popular, but in many cases they are broken up without any joint discovery. We provide a rationale for the breakup date in R&D collaboration agreements. More specifically, we consider a research consortium...

The analysis of adverse selection problems in seller-buyer relationships has typically been based on the assumption that private information is uncertifiable, while in practice it may well be certifiable. If a buyer has certifiable private information, he can conceal evidence, but he cannot...

This paper provides new analytical tools for studying principal-agent problems with adverse selection and limited commitment. By allowing the principal to use general communication devices we overcome the literature's common, but overly restrictive focus on one-shot, direct communication. In...

Delegated contracting describes a widely observable agency mode where a top principal, who has no direct access to a productive downstream agent, hires an intermediary to forward a sub-contract with specified output targets and payments. The principal makes the payment to the intermediary...

We develop a test for adverse selection and use it to examine private health insurance markets. In contrast to earlier papers that consider a purely private system or a system in which private insurance supplements a public system, we focus our attention on a system where privately funded health...

This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents’ production technologies display learning effects and agents’ rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show...

In the context of common agency adverse-selection games weillustrate that the revelation principle cannot be applied to studyequilibria of the multi-principal games. We then demonstrate thatan extension of the taxation principle what we term the delegation principle can be used to characterize...

We study a model of adverse selection, hard and soft information, and mentalizing ability-the human capacity to represent others' intentions, knowledge, and beliefs. By allowing for a continuous range of different information types, as well as for different means of acquiring information, we...

I consider a real business cycle model in which agents have private information about an idiosyncratic shock to their value of leisure. I consider the mechanism design problem for this economy and describe a computational method to solve it. This is an important contribution of the paper since...

The standard solution to adverse selection is the separating equilibrium introduced by Rothschild and Stiglitz. Usually, the Rothschild-Stiglitz argument is developed in a model that allows for two states of the world only. In this paper adverse selection is dis-cussed for continuous loss...