The objective of this note is to analyze some implications of the model of commodity money described in Banerjee and Maskin (1996) which may seem paradoxical. In order to do this, we incorporate a general production cost structure into the model. We focus on two different results. First, the...

I develop an overlapping-generations framework in which changes in lending standards generate endogenous cycles. In my economy, entrepreneurs who are privately informed about the quality of their projects need to borrow funds. Intermediaries screen entrepreneurs both through the amount of...

This paper applies the theory of auctioning incentive contracts to welfare-to-work programs. In several countries, the government procures welfare-to-work projects to employment service providers. In doing so, the government trades off adverse selection (the winning provider is not the most...

The tension between allocative efficiency and information aggregation is explored in the context of an auction: k identical objects of unknown quality are auctioned off to n bidders whose tastes affect their valuation of an object of given quality. Bidders receive a signal about the quality of...

We examine how owners of productive resources (e.g. public enterprises or financial capital) optimally allocate their resources among wealth-constrained operators of unknown ability. Optimal allocations exhibit: (1) shared enterprise profit--the resource owner always shares the operator's...

We study information transmission via polling. A policymaker polls constituents, who differ in their information and ideology, to determine policy. Full revelation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample, but not with a large one. In large polls, full information aggregation can arise in...

Research in sociology and ethics suggests that individuals adhere to social norms of behavior established by their peers. Within an agency framework, we model endogenous social norms by assuming that each agent’s cost of implementing an action depends on the social norm for that action,...