This paper considers a principal-agent model with auditing and collusion, in which the audit costs are a convex function of the audit reliability. The focus of interest is the question of the audit reliability chosen by the principal. It turns out that the optimal audit reliability strongly...

The theory of agency, which has seen many recent applications in the social sciences and management literatures, is essentially a theory of failures: It seeks to understand the problems created when one party attempts to control another's behavior, given that control is costly and it often does...

How does renegotiation affect contracts between a principal and an agent subject to persistent private information and moral hazard? This paper introduces a concept of renegotiationproofness, which adapts to stochastic games the concepts of weak renegotiation-proofness and internal consistency...

How does renegotiation affect contracts between a principal and an agent subject to persistent private information and moral hazard? This paper introduces a concept of renegotiation-proofness, which adapts to stochastic games the concepts of weak renegotiation-proofness and internal consistency...

How does renegotiation affect contracts between a principal and an agent subject to persistent private information and moral hazard? This paper introduces a concept of renegotiation-proofness, which adapts to stochastic games the concepts of weak renegotiation-proofness and internal consistency...

Given that an owner cannot commit to her timing strategy under a manager's hidden action, we consider (i) how the owner's timing decisions to launch a project and to replace the manager or change a project are determined, and (ii) how the optimal compensation contract for the manager is...

Infrastructure projects involve multiple parties: a government, private sector firms that build and manage, and outside investors who supply financing. Private sector firms need incentives to implement and maintain the projects well; governments may lack commitment not to extort cash flows (for...

We study managerial incentive provision under moral hazard in an environment where growth opportunities arrive stochastically over time and taking them requires a change of management. The firm faces a trade-off between the benefit of always having a manager able to seize new opportunities and...

Kenneth Arrow and Karl Borch published several important articles in the early 1960s that can be viewed as the beginning of modern economic analysis of insurance activity. This chapter reviews the main theoretical and empirical contributions in insurance economics since that time. The review...

This paper begins by summarizing the micro-evidence on credit markets from a large number of studies from all over the world, with the goal of identifying a number of stylized facts. We argue that, in particular, the evidence strongly suggests that for poor people in developing countries,...