Regulatory independence from political control enlarges the collusive opportunities between regulators and interest groups. This is costly for current politicians because deterring capture becomes harder. However, independence also constrains future governments. Whenever future and current...

We study Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) in a successive monopolies framework with adverse selection and moral hazard. The analysis compares both the private and the wel- fare properties of vertical contracts based on retail price restrictions with those derived under quantity .xing arrangements...

In a public good environment with positively correlated types, we characterize optimal mechanisms when agents have private information and can enter collusive agreements. First, we prove a weak-collusion-proof principle according to which there is no restriction for the principal in offering...

We propose a theory of supervision with endogenous transaction costs. A principle delegates part of his authority to a supervisor who can acquire soft information about an agent's productivity. If the supervisor were risk-neutral, the principal would simply make the better informed supervisor...

A risk averse agent gathers information on productivity shocks and produces accordingly on behalf of his principal. Information gathering is imperfect so that the agent has either complete or no knowledge at all of those shocks. The model allows for moral hazard in information gathering, private...

Since the 1980s, privatization of formerly state-owned firms has been extensively implemented by governments across Latin America. Despite the fact that most evaluations of the process fail to find significant adverse efficiency and welfare effects, there has been a strong surge in public...

This Paper analyses the impact of asymmetric information within countries on the pattern of international trade. We append to the standard 2×2 Heckscher-Ohlin model of a small economy a continuum of sectors producing intermediate non-tradable goods. Those goods are produced by monopolies having...

We construct and estimate a structural principal/agent model of contract renegotiation in the French urban transport sector in a context where operators are privately informed on their innate costs (adverse selection) and can exert cost-reducing managerial effort (moral hazard). This model...