This paper analyses three issues in strategic donor-recipient interaction motivated by the complexity of the rationale underlying aid. The first is when we have several principals with conflicting objectives. Any one principal cannot offer high powered incentives to the agent to carry out their...

The theory of agency, which has seen many recent applications in the social sciences and management literatures, is essentially a theory of failures: It seeks to understand the problems created when one party attempts to control another's behavior, given that control is costly and it often does...

The paper argues that financial deregulation incentivized financial firms to take excessive risks and over-expand because it turned social insurance against systemic risk into a common pool (or open) resource. The increased size and complexity of deregulated financial markets in turn raised the...

We analyze a model of moral hazard in local public services which could be efficiently managed by officials under local democratic accountability, but not by officials who are appointed by the ruler of a centralized autocracy. The ruler might prefer to retain an official who diverted resources...

Political parties play a crucial gatekeeping role in elections, including controlling electoral resources, candidate recruitment, and electoral list compositions. In making these strategic choices, parties aim to encourage candidates to invest in the campaign, while also trying to secure...

We examine a situation where efforts on different tasks positively affect production but are not separately verifiable and where the manager (principal) and the worker (agent) have different ideas about how production should be carried out: agents prefer a less efficient way of production. We...

This paper aims to characterise a dynamic, incentive-compatible contract for the provision of health services, allowing for both moral hazard and adverse selection. Patients' severity changes over time following a stochastic process and is private information of the provider. We characterise the...

Empirical literature on moral hazard focuses exclusively on the direct impact of asymmetric information on market outcomes, thus ignoring possible repercussions. We present a field experiment in which we consider a phenomenon that we call second-degree moral hazard - the tendency of the supply...

We consider a two-stage principal-agent model with limited liability in which a CEO is employed as agent to gather information about suitable merger targets and to manage the merged corporation in case of an acquisition. Our results show that the CEO systematically recommends targets with low...

Empirical literature on moral hazard focuses exclusively on the direct impact of asymmetric information on market outcomes, thus ignoring possible repercussions. We present a field experiment in which we consider a phenomenon that we call second-degree moral hazard – the tendency of the supply...