This paper deals with a special hold-up problem in privatization.

This paper deals with price--cap regulation of a monopolistic distribution grid which sells a license to some retailer. The sale of the license is a long--term incomplete contract. Both the grid and the licensee engage in relationship--specific investments before the value and costs of the...

This paper investigates the effects of information acquisition in the light of two different organisational structures in various competitive settings. While the intuitive expectation that growing uncertainty raises the incentives to gather information can be confirmed, a changing organisational...

We examine the question whether a decision should be delegated to a subordinate and whether this is done efficiently. We illustrate that delegation is useful for several reasons. First, it serves to test agents with unknown ability. Then, it may improve their motivation when carrying out...

The paper compares the productive efficiency of public and private enterprises in an adverse selection model with managerial effort. Under either ownership structure, the firm's manager has private information on his ability. The principal can invest in monitoring to elicit this ability. As a...

We suggest that people higher up in the income ladder care more for the 'quality of life' rather than for the level of income per se. We introduce such a behaviourial assumption in a model of 'rural-urban'and 'urban-urban' migration. 'Quality of life' depends crucially on the 'social...

Target-cost pricing has been a widely applied formula in defence contracting. If this type of pricing arrangement is chosen, the seller's ex-post profit consists of a fixed payment plus some share of the cost overrun, that is the difference between an ex--ante agreed estimation of the production...

Consider a p-variate counting process N = (...) with jump times {...}. Suppose that the intensity of jumps ... of ... at time t depends on the other components, i. e. ..., where the ... are unknown, nonrandom functions. From observing one single trajectory of the processes N over an increasing...

Compared with the traditional public-finance approach of a monolithic fully informed planner, earmarking of taxation is less likely to be optimal if a principal-agent setting is considered, where taxing and spending are performed by two separate agents which are monitored by the parliament. We...

It is widely believed that the English auction is solved after the dominated strategies are eliminated. This opinion is formally confirmed only for one "ascending clock" auction and can not be generalized for most other English auctions. In this paper I show that the formal argument which is...