In a multi-agent setting, individuals often compare own performance with that of their peers. These comparisons influence agents incentives and lead to a noncooperative game, even if the agents have to complete independent tasks. I show that depending on the interplay of the peer effects, agents...

We extend the theoretical model of external corporate financing to the case when the buyers of the borrowing firm may default during the financing period. In our setup there is an asymmetric information and hence moral hazard between the lender and the borrower concerning the effrts of the...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

A standard tournament contract specifies only tournament prizes. If agents' performance is measured on a cardinal scale, the principal can complement the tournament contract by a gap which defines the minimum distance by which the best performing agent must beat the second best to receive the...

We conducted six treatments of a standard moral hazard experiment with hidden action. All treatments had identical Nash equilibria. However, the behavior in all treatments and periods was inconsistent with established agency theory (Nash equilibrium). In the early periods of the experiment,...

We study optimal direct mechanisms for a credence goods expert who can be altruistic or spiteful. The expert has private information about her distributional preferences and possibly also about her customer's needs. We introduce a method that allows the customer to offer separate contracts to...

The probability of income loss depends on talent and effort. Effort has positive externalities and therefore individuals are proportion to their perceived diligence. The social norm requires more effort from individuals perceived as more talented, but talent is private information and...

This paper contributes to the debate on the efficacy of IMF's catalytic finance in preventing financial crises. Extending Morris and Shin (2006), we consider that the IMF's intervention policy usually exerts a signaling effect on private creditors and that several interventions in sequence may...

In this paper, we analyze the equilibrium incentive schemes oÞered to an agent by two principals who can only observe correlated noisy signals of the one-dimensional action taken by the agent. We look at both cases when the two principals can or cannot cooperate in setting the terms of their...

We examine a “Rotten Kid” model (Becker 1974) where a player with social preferences interacts with an egoistic player. We assume that social preferences are intentionbased rather than outcome-based. In a very general multi-stage setting we show that any equilibrium must involve mutually...