The relationship between policyholders and an Islamic insurance (takaful) operator is in essence a principal-agent relationship. This paper analyzes the power of incentives offered to takaful operators in mitigating problems associated with such a relationship. These incentives include wakalah,...

Anecdotal, empirical, and experimental evidence suggests that offering extrinsic rewards for certain activities can reduce people's willingness to engage in those activities voluntarily. We propose a simple rationale for this 'crowding out' phenomenon, using standard economic arguments. The...

We explore through both an economics and regulatory lens the frictions associated with credit rating agencies in the aftermath of the financial crisis. While ratings and other public signals are an efficient response to scale economies in information production, these also can discourage...

A repeated moral hazard setting in which the Principal privately observes the Agent's output is studied. It is shown that there is no loss from restricting the analysis to contracts in which the Agent is supposed to exert effort every period, receives a constant efficiency wage and no feedback...

Various approaches used in Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) to model endogenously determined interactions between agents are discussed. This concerns models in which agents not only (learn how to) play some (market or other) game, but also (learn to) decide with whom to do that (or not).

This article surveys the literature on principal-agent problems with moral hazard that gained popularity following the seminal works of Mirrlees (1976), Holmström (1979), and others. This literature is concerned with designing incentives to motivate one or more workers—typically by paying for...

Regulators and the firms they regulate interact repeatedly. Over the course of these interactions, the regulator collects data that contains information about the firm's id- iosyncratic private characteristics. This paper studies the case in which the regulator uses information gleaned from past...

The dynamics of incentive contracts under asymmetric information have long been an important topic in economics. We address this topic in this paper by considering a stochastic, two-period principal-agent relationship, in which the true state of the world can take on two possible values and is...

We propose a theory to explain the choice between nominal and indexed labor contracts. We find that contracts should be indexed if prices are difficult to forecast and nominal otherwise. Our analysis is based on a principal-agent model developed by Jovanovic and Ueda (1997) in which...

A lift zonoid criterion is proven to be necessary and sufficient for ranking signals in multi-task agency models, and can be applied to a broader set of signals than a multivariate MPS criterion. The two criteria coincide under certain conditions