Forming a common agency in oligopoly may introduce both advantageous and disadvantageous implications on the profits of the firms, if agents have access to private information about their costs. In addition to facilitating better coordination of production and pricing decisions, a common agency...

We evaluate the relationship between insurers (payers) and providers of health care (hospitals) when they each have a nonnegligible share of the market. We focus in particular on their incentives to merge and the existence of equilibria where payers offer preferential treatment to a subset of...

This paper surveys recent work in contract theory that relates to the allocation of tasks among agents within an organization as well as to the effect of product market competition upon optimal contracting and agency costs. Copyright (c) 1997 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

In the present paper, we relate the extent of job security offered to incumbent managers to the extent of competition among firms in the product market, where the extent of job security is measured by the probability that an incumbent manager continues to be employed by his current firm and the...