We show that the separation of powers in regulation may act as a commitment against the threat of regulatory capture. Splitting regulatory tasks and monitoring technologies among several non-benevolent regulators may reduce their discretion in engaging in socially wasteful activities. When...

We discuss the internal organization of the firm, arguing that the comparison between a centralized and a decentralized hierarchical organization should be cast in terms of the agency costs associated with the different side-contracting games that agents play in these organizations. In our...

We analyze the design of incentive mechanisms for the provision of transnational public goods under asymmetric information. Transnational public goods are infrastructures that no single country can afford to build for itself. We show that the external constraints imposed by this mechanism may...

When applied to groups, the revelation principle postulates a Bayesian-Nash behavior between agents. Their binding agreements are unenforceable or the principal can prevent them at no cost. The authors analyze instead a mechanism design problem in which the agents can communicate between...

The firm is often considered as a nexus of contracts linking the management and its different stakeholders: claim-holders, workers, unions, customers, suppliers, and the state, among others. This paper surveys recent work in contract theory, the multiprincipal incentive theory, and the theory of...