This paper addresses the question of how the principal's surplus and agency costs depend on the agent's wealth. Using the first-order approach, we identify properties of the agent's utility function which are sufficient conditions to guarantee that richer agents induce a lower expected surplus...

In recent years, regulatory bodies in Europe and around the world implemented Combinatorial Clock Auctions (CCA) to allocate scarce and valuable spectrum frequencies usage rights. Although the auction design is complex, the promise is that bidding becomes simple. More precisely, bidders may bid...

We extend the seminal Rothschild and Stiglitz (1976) model on competitive insurance markets with asymmetric information in the spirit of Wilson (1977)’s ‘anticipatory equilibrium’ by introducing an additional stage in which initial contracts can be withdrawn after observation of...

Insurance contracts are frequently modelled as principal–agent relationships. The purpose of this paper is to examine the interaction between differential bargaining power and the efficiency of insurance contracts. The analysis is undertaken in a framework of state-contingent production, which...