We examine the social desirability of learning about the regulated agent in a generalized principal-agent model with incomplete information. An interesting result we obtain is that there are situations in which the agent prefers a Bayesian regulator to have more, yet incomplete, information...

This paper analyzes the Baron and Myerson’s (B–M) (Econometrica 50: 911–930 [1982]) scheme of monopoly regulation, a standard representative of Bayesian mechanisms. As is well known, the hboxB–M mechanism (and other related mechanisms) have as an explicit starting point the assumption...

We show that in oligopolistic markets the social choice correspondence which selects all socially efficient outcomes is Nash implementable if the number of firms is at least two. Thus, monopoly regulation whenever consumers are favored by the designer or the society is the only framework, among...

It is not uncommon that a society facing a choice problem has also to choose the choice rule itself. In such situation voters’ preferences on alternatives induce preferences over the voting rules. Such a setting immediately gives rise to a natural question concerning consistency between these...

Self-selectivity is a new kind of consistency pertaining to social choice rules. It deals with the problem of whether a social choice rule selects itself from among other rival such rules when a society is also to choose the choice rule that it will employ in making its choice from a given set...

We examine the issue of learning in a generalized principal-agent model with incomplete information. We show that there are situations in which the agent prefers a Bayesian regulator to have more information about his private type. Moreover, the outcome of the Bayesian mechanism regulating the...