The lemons model assumes that owners of used cars have an informational advantage over potential buyers with respect to the quality of their vehicles. Owners of bad cars will try to sell them to unsuspecting buyers while owners of good cars will hold on to theirs. Consequently, the quality of...

We analyze the interaction of explicit and implicit contracts in a model with selfish and fair principals. Fair principals are willing to honor implicit agreements, whereas selfish principals are not. Principals are privately informed about their types. We investigate a separating equilibrium in...

This paper studies optimal contracts and monitoring policies in procurement under dynamic adverse selection and moral hazard concerning a cost-reducing investment decision. I assume fixed costs of investment and show that the resulting 'lumpy' investment behavior creates a motive to monitor...

The standard economic approach to designing institutions for collective decision making recognizes individuals' strategically rational motivations for misrepresentation and asks how best, given an objective function, to design a set of incentives and constraints to internalize or negate such...

William Easterly marshals yet another brilliant critique of established development policies, with a focus on the experts' excessive focus on state-led policies and goals (à la Myrdal) and ignorance of bottom-up solutions, including technology and individual rights (à la Hayek). It suggests a...

We use the theory of abstract convexity to study adverse-selection principal-agent problems and two-sided matching problems, departing from much of the literature by not requiring quasilinear utility. We formulate and characterize a basic underlying implementation duality. We show how this...

We show that direct investments by consumers without the use of financial intermediaries can efficiently allocate financial capital to firms seeking funding for production of a novel consumption good. In our setting, consumers are also investors, and their privately known consumption preferences...

We study optimal price discrimination when a monopolist faces a continuum of consumers with reference-dependent preferences. A consumer's valuation for product quality consists of an intrinsic valuation affected by a private state signal (type), and a gain-loss valuation that depends on...

We present a dynamic model that addresses how the interaction between durability and experience affects consumers’ replacement decisions. Despite obsolescence, consumers keep used goods because of quality uncertainty of new goods. Contrary to adverse selection articles, incomplete trade in...

We consider a two-candidate campaign competition in majoritarian systems with many voters. Some voters are loyal, some can be influenced by campaign spending. Own loyalty with respect to a candidate is the voter's private information. Candidates simultaneously choose their campaign budgets and...