This paper studies informational externalities between contracts. Two principals (for instance the governments of two neighbouring countries) deal with two different agents (for instance a railway company in each country). If, in the first period, an agent refuses the contract offered by his...

I study the question of how much product information should be available to consumers. A monopolist sells one unit of product. The consumer is initially uninformed of the product value but can incur costs to observe a noisy signal of his valuation. I show that consumer surplus can be increasing...

This paper derives an Equivalence Principle between organizational forms of supervisory and productive activities. We consider an organization with an agent privately informed on his productivity and a risk averse supervisor getting signals on the agent's type. In a centralized organization, the...

We compare two instruments to regulate a monopoly that has private information about its demand: fixing the price or the quantity produced. For each instrument, we consider two classes of mechanisms: sophisticated (screening menus) and simple (single menus). We characterize the optimal...

The questions addressed in this paper are related to access rules to primary care services and the potential for patient driven competition between GPs and specialists. Most of the literature on the performance of primary care has dealt with reforming payment schemes, little attention being paid...

This chapter reviews recent theoretical work on the design of regulatory policy, focusing on the complications that arise when regulated suppliers have better information about the regulated industry than do regulators. The discussion begins by characterizing the optimal regulation of a monopoly...

I compare certification and self-regulation, two widely used quality assurance mechanisms in markets where consumers do not observe the quality of goods. Certification is a mechanism in which an external firm offers a certificate to producers who undergo a testing procedure, issues the...

This article studies how delay in contracting depends on an exogenous signal. The agent whose cost is his private information may produce in the first period or be delayed until the second period. A signal about the cost of the agent is available between the two periods. The quality of the good...

There is a harmful mismatch between how information published by the government is perceived—as highly trustworthy—and the reality that it is often not. This Article shows that the government frequently collects information from third-party private entities and publishes it with no review or...

When is it better for the government to provide information, and when is this role better left to the market? I present a simple framework for evaluating this question, where the key factors are the cost of errors based on imperfect information and whether information is eventually revealed to...