When the information used by a principal to monitor an agent is private, and thus non-verifiable by a third party, the principal has a credibility issue with the agent. The agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information in order to collect a monetary penalty from...

In every democracy mass media play a crucial role in assuring the effective working of the political system. In this paper I focus on the role of media as "watchdog". In an agency relationship between politician and citizens, media perform the function of an informed supervisor. Previous works...

We present an experiment that models a repeated public good provision setting where the policy maker or manager does not have perfect control over information flows. Rather, information seeking can be affected by changing the information default as well as the price of information. The default...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

We examine whether and how democratic procedures can achieve socially desirable public good provision in the presence of profound uncertainty about the benefits of public goods, i.e., when citizens are able to identify the distribution of benefits only if they aggregate their private...

This paper surveys what can be learned from recent advances in the incomplete contract literature to understand how public goods are or should be provided. The paper starts with a section on the full information case that presents and discusses the classical Samuelson condition on the optimal...