Syndicates are good but not always. A number of studies have looked into the benefits of syndication and enumerated the various factors that lead to the positive outcome. There are few studies that allude to the negative side of syndication. Adding to the latter string of papers, this paper...

This note provides a general concept of how the conflict of interest between credit rating agencies and financial entities that hire them to rate issues can be severed. The concept stresses addressing the conflict with minimal government regulation. Only a skeleton concept is offered -- the goal...

When economic agents decide their optimal environmental behavior, they have to take into account non continuos evolutionary trends and irreversible changes characterising environmental phenomena. Given the still non perfect biophysical and economic knowledge, decisions have to be taken in an...

For the classic agency model (Holmström, 1979), under different assumptions, we offer a completely different solution than the standard solution in the literature. Our optimal contract has a closed form, offers a contingent fixed payment, and is efficient. In contrast, the standard contract in...

When a seller hires an agent to sell his/her property, a successful outcome depends on the list price, marketing time, unobserved relative bargaining power of the buyers and sellers, and the effort levels of the seller and the seller's agent. A divergence with respect to the list/transaction...

A manager's compensation contract and the level of resources available to him jointly influence his incentives to acquire information about different investment alternatives as well as his resource allocate decisions. We show that the optimal compensation contract induces investment allocations...

This paper shows that monitoring too much a partner in the initial phase of a relationship may not be optimal if the goal is to determine his loyalty to the match and if the cost of ending the relationship increases over time. The intuition is simple: by monitoring too much we learn less on how...

This paper extends the standard principal-agent model with moral hazard to allow for agents having reference-dependent preferences according to Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The main finding is that loss aversion leads to fairly simple contracts. In particular, when shifting the focus from...

This paper provides a rationale for equal sharing in heterogeneous partnerships. We introduce project choice and information sharing to a standard team production setting. A team with two agents can choose whether they want to work on a status quo project or on an alternative project. If the...