We examine how long-term life insurance contracts can be designed to incorporate uncertain future bequest needs. An individual who buys a life insurance contract early in life is often uncertain about the future financial needs of his or her family, in the event of an untimely death. Ideally,...

This paper proposes a model for a certification market with an imperfect testing technology. Such a technology only assures that whenever two products are tested the higher quality product is more likely to pass than the lower quality one. When only one certifier with such testing technology is...

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 analyse how his decision...

It is argued that drug consumption, most commonly alcohol drinking, can be a technology to give up some control over one's actions and words. It can be employed by trustworthy players to reveal their type. Similarly alcohol can function as a social lubricant and faciliate type revelation in...

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...

Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) show that there need not exist a competitive equilibrium in markets with adverse selection. Building on their framework we demonstrate that externalities between agents - an agent's utility upon accepting a contract depends on the average type attracted by the...

The empirical evidence of adverse selection in insurance markets is mixed. The problem in assessing the extent of adverse selection is that private information, on which agents act, is generally unobservable to the researcher, which makes it difficult to distinguish between adverse selection and...

Would you go to the dentist more often if it were free? Observational data is here used to analyze the impact of full-coverage insurance on dental care utilization using different identification strategies. The challenge of assessing the bite of moral hazard without an experimental study design...

We consider how a benevolent regulator should regulate a polluting export industry when the industry, having private information about its abatement efficiency, has an option to move its operations abroad, with a type-dependent outside option rent. The paper focuses on the case where outside...

Regulating an export firm (or a homogeneous industry) with private information about emission technology is analysed, when the firm, owned partly by foreigners, has an option to bypass domestic regulation through costly relocation. If the firm chooses to relocate, it will set up a new plant in a...