We characterize the conditions under which industry-wide agreements on refund policies weaken price competition. We identify the conditions under which joint industry proffit increases with the amount of refunds promised to those consumers who cancel a reservation or return a product. We compare...

Most problems with formal sector credit lending to the poor in developing countries can be attributed to the lack of information and inadequate collateral. One common feature of successful credit mechanisms is group-lending, where the loan is advanced to an individual if he/she is a part of a...

This paper studies repeated games where the time of repetitions of the stage game is not known or controlled by the players. Many economic situations of interest where players repeatedly interact share this feature, players do not know exactly when is the next time they will be called to play...

We analyze the effect of counterparty risk on insurance contracts using the case of credit risk transfer in banking. In addition to the familiar moral hazard problem caused by the insuree's ability to influence the probability of a claim, this paper uncovers a new moral hazard problem on the...

How are we to understand the East Asian crisis? There are two popular explanations: first that it was just like a nineteenth century British bank panic, calling for prompt action by a 'lender of last resort', namely the IMF; second that it was much worse —nothing less than the bursting of a...

Central bank policy suffers from time-inconsistency when facing a banking crisis: A bailout is optimal ex post but ex ante it should be limited to control moral hazard. Dollarization provides a credible commitment not to help at the cost of not helping even when it would be ex ante optimal to do...

This paper examines the relationship between real estate agent's quest for reputation and referrals from past and current customers as the agent's source of business. The research results suggest that there is a significant strong positive correlation between the agent's quest for reputation and...

Es wird untersucht, wie ein System privater Versicherungen gegen das Risiko der Arbeitslosigkeit beschaffen sein sollte. Zu dem Zweck wird ein Trennsystem vorgeschlagen, das Arbeitnehmern und Arbeitgebern gleichermaßen Anreize zur Verminderung von Arbeitslosigkeit gibt. Für die Arbeitnehmer...

This paper is concerned with evaluating alternative unemployment insurance (UI) schemes in a dynamic economy with moral hazard. We consider changes in the size and duration of UI benefits, and the effects of experience rating, and use a dynamic contracting approach to determine a benchmark...

Under certain conditions the optimal insurance policy will offer full coverage above a deductible, as Arrow and others have shown long time ago. Interestingly, the same design of insurance policies applies in case of a single loss and ex-ante moral hazard. However, many insurance policies...