Asymmetric information plays an important role in markets and politics. When parties are asymmetrically informed and have misaligned preferences, they may be hurt by adverse selection. By contrast, if parties know that their preferences are aligned, they may benefit from advantageous selection....

The existence of asymmetric information in insurance markets has been studied extensively in the economics literature, whereas the factors likely to influence asymmetric information have had less attention. Using individual level insurance data from a Takaful health insurance company located in...

Politicians invest millions of public money in programs with the goal of creating new jobs in order to increase the overall wealth in their countries. While most State and Federal programs focus on small business without differentiating between high-potential startups and small businesses likely...

Reputation concerns of politicians sometimes force them to implement biased policies. We study the effect of reputation (i.e., reelection) concerns on taxation in the age of globalization. To this end, we construct a two-country asymmetric tax competition model in which the residents in one of...

This paper develops a dynamic model of legislative policy making with evolving, privately observed policy preferences. Our goal is to find conditions under which decision rules, which assign feasible policies based on the legislators' preferences, are sustainable in the long run. We show that...

This paper analyzes the role of yardstick competition for improving political decisions. We examine how performance comparisons across jurisdictions affect the agency problem resulting from uncertainty about politicians (adverse selection) and their policies (moral hazard). We study two forms of...

We study two all-pay auctions, where contestants cannot compete in both auctions. One contest has a higher prize than the other. Ideally, high-ability contestants should participate in the contest with a higher prize. We find that this is not necessarily the case. We show that the top contestant...

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...

In this paper we analyse several measures which are typically included in a social security reform: a cut in the social security benefits, an increase in the social security tax and tax incentives for the purchase of private life annuities, which have recently become quite popular at the...

This paper investigates the effect of adverse selection on the private annuity market in a model with two periods of retirement. In order to introduce the existence of limited-time pension insurance, we assume that for each period of retirement separate contracts can be purchased. Demand for the...