We study a credit market with adverse selection and moral hazard where sufficient sorting is impossible. The crucial novel feature is the competition between lenders in their choice of contracts offered. Qualities of investment projects are not observable by banks and investment decisions of...

Governments must usually take policy decisions with an imperfect knowledge of the economic actors' type or the actors' effort level. These issues are addressed within the framework of classic adverse selection or moral hazard models. I discuss in this paper how would the government's and the...

A life care annuity is a bundled insurance product comprised of a life annuity and long-term care insurance. Some recent studies find the two risks-longevity risk and long-term care risk-to be opposing and thus life care annuities advantageous in regard to pooling the two risks. Based on...

The lemons model assumes that owners of used cars have an informational advantage over potential buyers with respect to the quality of their vehicles. Owners of bad cars will try to sell them to unsuspecting buyers while owners of good cars will hold on to theirs. Consequently, the quality of...

We study the effects of improvements in eBay's rating mechanism on seller exit and continuing sellers' behavior. Following a large sample of sellers over time, we exploit the fact that the rating mechanism was changed to reduce strategic bias in buyer rating. That improvement did not lead to...

Asset securitization offers banks the possibility of altering their capital structures and the financial intermediation process. This study shows that the introduction of securitization is associated with fundamental changes in the funding policies of banks. In particular, we present evidence of...

In this paper we propose a simple method of characterizing countervailing incentives in adverse selection problems. The key element in our characterization consists of analyzing properties of the full information problem. This allows solving the principal problem without using optimal control...

We consider a general adverse selection model as an optimal control problem with mixed constraints. We prove that under broad conditions the optimal contract exists and is continuous.

In this survey we present some of the more significant results in the literature on adverse selection in insurance markets. Sections 1 and 2 introduce the subject and Section 3 discusses the monopoly model developed by Stiglitz (1977) for the case of single-period contracts extended by many...