We study a supply chain model where competing manufacturers located around a circle contract with privately informed and exclusive retailers. The number of brands in the market (determined by the manufacturers’ zero profit condition) depends on the level of asymmetric information within supply...

We revisit the choice of product differentiation by competing firms in the Hotelling model, under the assumption that firms are vertically separated, and that retailers choose products’ characteristics. We show that retailers with private information about their marginal costs choose to...

When do principals independently choose to share the information obtained from their privately informed agents? Information sharing affects contracting within competing organizations and induces agents’ strategies to be correlated through the distortions imposed by principals to obtain...

We consider a manufacturer's incentive to sell through an independent retailer, rather than directly to final consumers, when contracts with retailers cannot be observed by competitors. If retailers conjecture that identical competing manufacturers always offer identical contracts (symmetry...

Motivated by the recent experimental evidence on altruistic behavior, we study a simple principal–agent model where each player cares about other players' utility, and may reciprocate their attitude towards him. We show that, relative to the selfish benchmark, efficiency improves when players...

This paper studies the optimal fiscal treatment of addictive goods (cigarettes, drugs, fatty foods, alcohol, gambling etc.). It shows that, when agents have private information about their productivity levels and their degree of rationality, the Atkinson and Stiglitz result of optimal uniform...

Strotz (1956) first suggested that individuals are more impatient when making short-run tradeoffs than long-run ones. Many experimental studies supports his conjecture. Motivated by recent evidence from the British Department of Work and Pension (2006), this paper applies this behavioral...