Governments must usually take policy decisions with an imperfect knowledge of the economic actors' type or the actors' effort level. These issues are addressed within the framework of classic adverse selection or moral hazard models. I discuss in this paper how would the government’s and the...

We show that contracting in agency with voluntary participation may involve incentives for the agent's abstention. Their provision alters the optimality criteria in the principal's decision-making, further distorts the mechanism, and may lead to breakdown of contracting in circumstances where...

This paper investigates the effect of adverse selection on the private annuity market in a model with two periods of retirement and two types of individuals, who differ in their life expectancy. In order to introduce the existence of limited-time pension insurance, we consider a model where for...

This paper investigates the effect of adverse selection and price competition on the private annuity market in a model with two retirement periods. In this framework annuity companies can offer contracts with different payoffs over the periods of retirement. Varying the time structure of the...

In a financial market where agents trade for short-term profit and where news can increase the uncertainty of the public belief, there are strategic complementarities in the acquisition of private information and, if the cost of information is sufficiently small, a continuum of equilibrium...

We analyse pricing, effort and tipping decisions in the online service Google Answers. While users set a price for the answer to their question ex ante, they can additionally give a tip to the researcher ex post. In line with the related experimental literature we find evidence that tipping is...