involuntary unemployment in economies with efficient risk sharing abstract we study economies where employment lotteries determine random layoffs and incomes for employed and unemployed agents allocate risk efficiently we ask for which specifications are unemployed agents worse off a situation we call involuntary unemployment we show unemployed agents are worse off iff an exogenous increase in wealth decreases aggregate unemployment in a monetary economy we show that in equilibrium the unemployed are worse off iff high inflation implies high unemployment our model also generates nominal wage stickiness as an equilibrium phenomenon but neither involuntary unemployment nor nominal stickiness implies these economies are operating inefficiently or are out of equilibrium

price coherence and excessive intermediation suppose an intermediary provides a benefit to buyers when they purchase from sellers using the intermediary s technology we develop a model to show that the intermediary would want to restrict sellers from charging buyers more for transactions it intermediates with this restriction an intermediary can profitably raise demand for its services by eliminating any extra price buyers face for purchasing through the intermediary we show that this leads to inflated retail prices excessive adoption of the intermediaries services over investment in benefits to buyers and a reduction in consumer surplus and sometimes welfare competition among intermediaries intensifies these problems by increasing the magnitude of their effects and broadening the circumstances in which they arise we discuss applications to payment card systems travel reservation systems rebate services and various other intermediaries jel codes d40 l11 l14 l42

sex differences in tenure profiles effects of shared firm specific investment this article employs a model of masanori hashimoto with extensions by donald parsons to analyze variation in tenure by sex age and firm type fixed wage contracts eliminate postcontractual opportunism associated with firm specific human capital investment however such contracts result in inefficient quits and terminations calibration of the sharing of this investment between workers and employers minimizes the costs of these inefficient separations moreover this optimal sharing rate varies systematically with the characteristics listed above these tenure slope implications are tested with favorable results

fiscal federalism and lobbying abstract which government functions should be decentralized resp centralized once lobbying behavior is taken into account we find that the answer largely depends on how the interests of the regional lobbies are positioned with respect to the function to be decentralized resp centralized when regional lobbies have conflicting interests then lobbying is less damaging for social welfare under centralization than under decentralization on the contrary when regional lobbies have aligned interests then lobbying is less damaging for social welfare under decentralization provided that policy spillovers on the non organized groups are not too strong

transparency and economic policy we provide a two period model of political competition in which voters imperfectly observe the electoral promises made to other voters imperfect observability generates an incentive for candidates to offer excessive transfers even if voters are homogeneous and taxation is distortionary government spending is larger than in a world of perfect observability transfers are partly financed through government debt and the size of the debt is higher in less transparent political systems the model provides an explanation of fiscal churning it also predicts that groups whose transfers are less visible to others receive higher transfers and that imperfect transparency of transfers may lead to underprovision of public goods from the policy perspective the main novelty of our analysis is a separate evaluation of the transparency of spending and the transparency of revenues we show that the transparency of the political system does not unambiguously improve efficiency transparency of spending is beneficial but transparency of revenues can be counterproductive because it endogenously leads to increased wasteful spending

vertical control opportunism and risk sharing abstract a manufacturer who offers secret contracts faces an opportunism problem she undercuts her own input prices and fails to offset retail competition i show that this problem diminishes when retailers are risk averse and face demand uncertainty risk aversion and uncertainty create a bilateral risk sharing incentive that raises equilibrium input prices above marginal cost the manufacturer can therefore profit from downstream risk aversion when retail competition is fierce

field of use restrictions in licensing agreements a widely used clause in license contracts the field of use restriction four precludes licensees from operating outside of the technical field specified when a technology has several distinct applications four allow the licensor to divide up his rights and attribute them to the lowest cost producer in each field of use this can improve production efficiency with complex technologies however the boundaries of fields of use may be difficult to codify entailing a risk of licensees rights overlapping we explore how this affects the optimal license contract in a moral hazard framework where the licensor s effort determines the probability of overlap we show that depending on the contracting environment the license agreement may include output restrictions and non linear royalty schemes

dynamic processes of social and economic interactions on the persistence of inefficiencies an economy with a finite number of agents and a finite number of states is considered an exogenous institutional rule prescribes which moves from one state to another are feasible to each coalition at each time an agent is called to act with some exogenous probability and he chooses a coalition a feasible new state to move the economy to and side payments between the agents in the coalition the setup can be applied to various dynamic processes of social and economic interactions such as legislative bargaining coalition formation or exchange economies whenever agents are unable to write long term contracts but are otherwise unconstrained both in their ability to write arbitrary spot contracts and in their ability to collude there can be long run inefficiencies with cycles or inefficient steady states however when agents are sufficiently patient the initial state from which the process starts plays no role in the long run moreover when there exists an efficient state that is free of negat

pollution claim settlements under private information abstract the classical problem of resolving a nuisance dispute between a pollution generating firm and nearby residents is modelled here as a mechanism design problem we assume that the designer of the mechanism is the firm that it is uncertain about the actual losses suffered by residents and that the initial assignment of property rights is one where each resident is entitled to prevail we derive a profitmaximizing scheme under the individual rationality and incentive compatibility constraints and examine its properties it is shown that the outcomes it yields are sometimes inefficient moreover when many residents are affected by pollution and the degree of uncertainty with respect to the losses they suffer is large these inefficiencies become rampant

backward stealing and forward manipulation in the wto abstract motivated by the structure of wto negotiations we analyze a bargaining environment in which negotiations proceed bilaterally and sequentially under the most favored nation mfn principle we identify backward stealing and forward manipulation problems that arise when governments bargain under the mfn principle in a sequential fashion we show that these problems impede governments from achieving the multilateral efficiency frontier unless further rules of negotiation are imposed we identify the wto nullification or impairment and renegotiation provisions and its reciprocity norm as rules that are capable of providing solutions to these problems in this way we suggest that wto rules can facilitate the negotiation of efficient multilateral trade agreements in a world in which the addition of new and economically significant countries to the world trading system is an ongoing process

on the role of confidentiality and deadlines in bilateral negotiations abstract the preference between public and private negotiations for a buyer who sequentially visits two sellers is examined it is shown that the buyer weakly prefers private negotiations so as to create strategic uncertainty about the trade history with substitute goods such uncertainty is valuable only when price offers have short deadlines that prevent a head to head competition with complementary goods strategic uncertainty is valuable to the extent that price coordination becomes a concern for sellers which is likely to be the case when sellers possess high bargaining powers their price offers have short deadlines and or goods are weak complements sellers strategic deadline choices as well as their incentives to disclose information about negotiations are also investigated

some neglected social costs of government spending in farm programs economic welfare analyses of farm programs typically assume that the direct social opportunity cost of subsidy payments is one dollar per dollar of government spending recent literature suggests that the marginal opportunity cost of a dollar of u s federal government spending is more likely to be in the range of 1 20 to 1 50 this implies that the net social costs of farm programs that involve government spending are significantly greater than the typical estimates in addition the normative efficiency ranking of alternative policies is sensitive to the marginal opportunity cost of government spending

the control of invasive species on private property with neighbor to neighbor spillovers invasive pests cross property boundaries property managers may have private incentives to control invasive species despite not having sufficient incentive to fully internalize the external costs of their role in spreading the invasion each property manager has a right to future use of his own property but his property may abut others properties enabling spread of an invasive species the incentives for a foresighted property manager to control invasive species have received little attention we consider the efforts of a foresighted property manager who has rights to future use of a property and has the ability to engage in repeated discrete control activities we find that higher rates of dispersal associated with proximity to neighboring properties reduce the private incentives for control controlling species at one location provides incentives to control at a neighboring location control at neighboring locations are strategic complements and coupled with spatial heterogeneity lead to a weaker link public good problem in which each property owner is unable to fully appropriate the benefits of his own control activity future use rights and private costs suggest that there is scope for a series of coase like exchanges to internalize much of the costs associated with species invasion pigouvian taxes on invasive species potentially have qualitatively perverse behavioral effects a tax with a strong income effect e g failure of effective revenue recycling can reduce the value of property assets and diminish the incentive to manage insects on one s own property

optional fixed fees in multilateral vertical relations abstract we examine vertical contracting in a perfect information environment in contrast to mcafee and schwartz mcafee r p schwartz m 1994 opportunism in multilateral vertical contracting nondiscrimination exclusivity and uniformity american economic review vol 84 pp 210 230 we demonstrate that outcomes are efficient if an upstream monopolist has the choice of requiring upfront fixed fee payments or making them optional

socially excessive dissemination of patent licences compared with the social optimum a monopolist usually sells too little this result seemingly includes the case of a lab that licences its patented cost innovation katz and shapiro 1986 find conditions under which the lab will issue fewer than the socially optimal number of licences however i find instead that its incentives can be socially too high the monopoly seller may sell too much for example it can be profit maximizing to sell several licences while it is socially optimal that none is sold en comparaison avec l optimum social un monopoleur habituellement vend trop peu voila qui semble tenir pour le cas d un laboratoire qui vend des licences pour une innovation brevetee qui reduit les couts katz shapiro 1986 ont montre dans quelles conditions le laboratoire va emettre moins que le nombre optimal de licences cependant l auteur decouvre que les incitations peuvent plutot l amener a en emettre trop plus que l optimum social par exemple il se peut que la maximisation du profit amene a vendre plusieurs licences alors qu il serait socialement optimal de n en vendre aucune

collusion exclusion and inclusion in random order bargaining this paper examines the profitability of three types of integration in a cooperative game solved by a random order value e g the shapley value collusion between players i and j is a contract merging their resources in the hands of one of them say i this contract can be represented as a combination of exclusion which lets i exclude j s resource but not use it himself and inclusion which lets i use j s resource but not exclude j from it this representation yields a third difference condition on the characteristic function that determines the profitability of collusion generalizing existing results for specific games namely collusion is profitable unprofitable when the complementarity of the colluding players is reduced increased by other players

markets for ownership the prevailing economic theory of the firm based on a property rights perspective has demonstrated that ownership by dispensable outside parties is an inefficient outcome relative to ownership by productive agents in order to better understand observed patterns of ownership this paper considers the outcome of ma rkets for ownership that operate prior to production taking place the main result is that outside parties will often become the equilibrium asset owners this is precisely because but for ownership such parties would not earn rents in contrast productive agents earn rents even when they do not own assets given that their contribution is complementary with other productive agents their willingness to pay for ownership is less than that of an outside party this result is robust to the introduction of moderate levels of inefficiency arising from outside ownership and to a consideration of opportunities for re sale before production begins the main conclusion drawn is that the nature of the operation of markets for ownership stands alongside incentive effects as important predictors of firm boundaries journal of economic literature classification numbers d23 l22

tv wars exclusive content and platform competition in pay tv the article examines incentives for exclusive distribution of premium television programming static analysis shows that a vertically integrated operator with premium programming always supplies this content to the rival distributor using per subscriber fees to soften competition in a dynamic setting with switching costs exclusivity confers a market share advantage benefiting the operator in the future under certain conditions this future benefit outweighs the opportunity cost of forgone wholesale fees making exclusivity the preferred choice alternative dynamic mechanisms are explored identifying essential features the analysis explains the observed incidence of content exclusivity in pay tv and provides guidance for policy makers

female leadership and gender equity evidence from plant closure abstract we use unique worker plant matched panel data to measure differences in wage changes experienced by workers displaced from closing plants we observe larger losses among women than men comparing workers who move from the same closing plant to the same new firm however we find a significantly smaller gap in hiring firms with female leadership the results are strongest among women who are displaced from male led plants and from less competitive industries our results suggest an important externality to having women in leadership positions they cultivate more female friendly cultures inside their firms

trading between agents for a better match this paper studies externalities that arise when agents can trade outcomes ex post i show that when agents can trade outcomes ex post principals are incentivized to contract with agents ex ante to reduce ex post transfers to outside agents with whom the principals do not directly contract this causes principals to offer agents piece rates that are inefficiently low and lower than the piece rates they would offer if trading was not allowed although trading reduces an agent s effort and could increase the agent s outside option of rejecting a principal s ex ante contract principals ultimately gain from allowing ex post trading because such trading results in outcomes that better match their tastes

the limits of monopolization through acquisition we address the question of whether competitive acquisition of firms by their rivals can result in complete or partial monopolization of a homogeneous product industry this question is modeled in terms of two distinct three stage noncoopera tive games analysis of subgame perfect pure strategy nash equilibria of these games discloses that under simplifying assumptions monopolization of an industry through acquisition is limited to industries with relatively few firms partial monopolization is either limited in scope or can be completely eliminated by prohibiting any owner from acquiring over 50 percent of the firms in the industry

firm specific human capital as a shared investment comment employment relationships typically involve the division of surplus surplus can be the result of a good match a monopoly rent or a quasirent that arises because of a specific investment the division of this surplus is of economic interest as it is a determinant of turnover investment and wages gary s becker 1962 argued in the context of specific human capital investments that the incumbent employee and firm will share the surplus this notion was formalized in a prototypical model of surplus sharing as first proposed by masanori hashimoto 1981 the model has been studied extensively among others by h lorne carmichael 1983 robert e hall and edward p lazear 1984 and donald o parsons 1986 while elizabeth becker and cotton m lindsay 1994 provide an empirical application the key feature of the model is the existence of transaction costs both the employee and the firm have ex ante uncertain private information on which they cannot write a contingent contract this makes that they write a nonrenegotiable contract that specifies a fixed wage after this the firm learns the value of the employee s marginal product whereas the employee learns the value of his outside option both parties then decide unilaterally whether to separate or not and inefficient separations may occur the wage is set in such a way as to maximize the expected total surplus the present analysis will consider the role of uncertainty in this model this has not been done before in a rigorous way hashimoto considered only degenerate cases his analysis suggests that the wage will be low when the uncertainty of the market conditions is small and high when the uncertainty of the conditions inside the firm is small parsons 1986 makes a claim that this is actually the case without deriving the result this paper shows that the comparative statics are ambiguous and may well be the opposite of those suggested by hashimoto and claimed by parsons it also provides the intuition that is behind this result namely that uncertainty not only influences turnover but also the option value of the match and its opportunity cost section i briefly summarizes hashimoto s model and shows that without further assumptions the comparative statics are ambiguous section ii derives an explicit solution of the wage section iii briefly considers alternative wage setting schemes and section iv concludes

worker effort decisions and efficient gender specific wage tenure profiles i introduction during the past thirty years women have increased their labor force participation female labor market intermittency has decreased and women s total labor market experience and years of tenure with the current employer have increased what these trends imply about the evolution of the gender gap in wages depends in part on gender differences in returns to tenure it is therefore surprising that economists have all but ignored the empirical finding that women have higher returns to tenure than do men over a significant portion of their working lives one reason why this finding has been ignored or treated as an anomaly may be the lack of theoretical constructs which predict an inverse gender gap in returns to tenure several labor market models predict that women should have lower returns to tenure than men human capital theory offers the most frequently cited explanation of flatter earnings profiles for female workers according to human capital theory gains from specialization and exchange lead to one household member specializing in home production and the other in market work since only women bear children historically the outcome of the exchange has been that women have specialized in home production indeed all surveys of time use indicate that women spend on average two to three times as long on housework as men as a consequence of this allocation women anticipate intermittent labor force participation and fewer years overall in the labor force than men this pattern too is borne out in national surveys which invariably find shorter average tenure and fewer total years of labor market experience for women than for men women typically have shorter completed job spells as well hall 1982 table 5 presents evidence that the gender gap in completed job duration is quite large he estimates that 63 8 percent of men but only 49 6 percent of women hold jobs with eventual tenure of at least five years with 37 3 and 15 1 percent of men and women respectively holding jobs with eventual tenure of at least twenty years because of the greater intermittency and shorter anticipated work history for women than men women will find it optimal to acquire less human capital than men 1 lesser quantities of general human capital tends to flatten both the observed earnings experience profile and the observed earnings tenure profile two factors contribute to this pattern first skills deteriorate during periods out of the labor market as in mincer and polachek 1974 which flattens the earnings experience profile for women relative to men second women anticipating discontinuous work histories select into occupations with flatter earnings profiles to minimize the penalty to labor force withdrawals as in polachek 1981 the effects of firm specific human capital on gender differences in wage tenure profiles vary across models for example kuhn 1993 constructs an elegant game theoretic model of gender differences in training and wages if women have a higher exogenous exit rate than men in equilibrium they will be placed in jobs with lower levels of firm specific training with a positive relation between training and productivity and a common share rate of the costs and benefits of specific training for men and women the wage tenure profiles of men will be steeper than those for women in contrast becker and lindsay 1994 argue that firm specific human capital leads to higher returns to tenure for women than men becker and lindsay assume that men and women have the same level of firm specific training however women have greater variance in their opportunity cost of remaining with a firm and so are more likely than men to separate inefficiently by giving women a greater share of both the costs and benefits of firm specific human capital through a steeper wage tenure profile firms reduce undesirable turnover although human capital arguments dominate the literature on gender differences in the labor market other models of wage growth predict flatter wage tenure profiles for women

naked exclusion efficient breach and downstream competition previous papers by eric b rasmusen j mark ramseyer and john s wiley jr 1991 and ilya r segal and michael d whinston 2000 argue that exclusive contracts can inefficiently deter entry in the presence of scale economies and multiple buyers we first show that these results no longer hold when buyers are final consumers who can breach these contracts and pay expectation damages we then show however that exclusive contracts can inefficiently deter entry if buyers are downstream competitors even in the absence of scale economies and even if breach is possible

private contracting with externalities divide and conquer abstract this paper considers the efficacy of divide and conquer strategies in principal agent games involving contracting with externalities we find that whereas divide and conquer offers can arise in equilibrium under some conditions when the principal s offers are publicly observable they cannot arise in equilibrium when the principal s offers are privately observable and the agents hold passive out of equilibrium beliefs this insight applies to technology and platform adoption decisions with network effects labor relations settlement negotiations and input licensing among others

over confidence may reduce negotiation delay abstract when a seller negotiates with multiple buyers how does over confidence affect the timing of trade in this paper we distinguish between over confidence about trade opportunities and over confidence about the terms of trade in bargaining environments without externalities both types of over confidence can cause delays in agreement if externalities are present the two forms of subjective bias have very different impacts on delay in particular over confidence about trade opportunities may reduce bargaining delay

indivisible labor and the business cycle abstract a growth model with shocks to technology is studied labor is indivisible so all variability in hours worked is due to fluctuations in the number employed we find that unlike previous equilibrium models of the business cycle this economy displays large fluctuations in hours worked and relatively small fluctuations in productivity this finding is independent of individuals willingness to substitute leisure across time this and other findings are the result of studying and comparing summary statistics describing this economy an economy with divisible labor and post war u s time series

buy coal a case for supply side environmental policy free riding is at the core of environmental problems if a climate coalition reduces its emissions world prices change and nonparticipants typically emit more they may also extract the dirtiest type of fossil fuel and invest too little in green technology the coalition s second best policy distorts trade and is not time consistent however suppose that the countries can trade the rights to exploit fossil fuel deposits as soon as the market clears the above mentioned problems vanish and the first best is implemented in short the coalition s best policy is to simply buy foreign deposits and conserve them

animal disease incidence and indemnity eradication programs abstract there are many options for controlling the spread of animal diseases some diseases have been treated as public sector problems and many nations have tried to control disease spread by purchasing sick animals from farmers government agencies have purchased breeding stock that might transmit diseases government agencies have purchased animals that might otherwise have gone to the slaughterhouse thereby keeping pathogens out of the food supply our hypothesis is that when it is not immediately obvious to farmers or private sector buyers which animals carry or transmit diseases a government indemnity program s success is not assured instead disease control depends on farmers ability to respond to the relative prices they face we examine the incentives created by prices indemnity payment levels government agencies choose the scrapie indemnity eradication program in the united states 1952 1992 provides a natural laboratory for measuring the responsiveness to government set prices we show that government set prices played a major role in determining the program s outcome the supply of infected animals was price elastic we argue that short run movements in relative prices and the number of infected animals offer a practical method for assessing program effectiveness

opportunism and menus of two part tariffs we show that a menu of two part tariffs can solve the opportunism problem identified by mcafee and schwartz 1994 in vertical games with sequential contracting provided the sunk costs incurred by the first firm to invest are not too large if the seller were to engage in opportunism with a second firm in an attempt to shift rents from the first firm the first firm could mitigate the dissipation of its rents by choosing from its menu of contract options the tariff with the higher marginal price and lower fixed fee the prospect of the first firm s choosing the wrong two part tariff in the event of opportunism is in some environments sufficient to make opportunism unprofi table for the seller

foreign direct investment in vertically related markets we study an mne s choice of fdi mode in a vertically related market with local input sourcing we show how the market s vertical structure and trading features affect this choice an mne s incentives to expand through cross border acquisition rather than through greenfield investment are stronger in markets with higher upstream bargaining power upstream concentration and unobservable contract terms the opposite holds in markets in which wholesale price contracts instead of two part tariffs are used our welfare analysis suggests that the host country should not always welcome fdi and should discourage fdi through acquisition investissements exterieurs directs sur les marches verticaux dans cet article nous etudions le choix d une entreprise multinationale de proceder a un investissement exterieur direct dans un marche vertical avec sources d approvisionnement locales nous montrons la facon dont la structure verticale et les caracteristiques commerciales du marche ont une incidence sur une telle decision les mesures incitatives offertes aux entreprises multinationales pour se developper par l entremise d acquisitions transfrontalieres plutot que par l investissement dans de nouvelles installations sont plus fortes sur les marches dotes d un pouvoir de negociation et d une concentration en amont plus eleves ainsi que par des conditions contractuelles non observables l inverse s observe sur les marches ou les contrats a prix de gros sont utilises en lieu et place des tarifs binomes en termes de bien etre notre analyse suggere que le pays hote ne devrait pas toujours accueillir les investissements exterieurs directs et devrait decourager ces memes investissements realises par l entremise d acquisitions

contracts and externalities how things fall apart a single principal interacts with several agents offering them contracts the crucial assumption of this paper is that the outside option payoffs of the agents depend positively on how many uncontracted or free agents there are we study how such a principal unwelcome though he may be approaches the problem of contract provision to agents when coordination failure among the latter group is explicitly ruled out two variants are considered when the principal cannot re approach agents there is a unique equilibrium in which contract provision is split up into two phases in phase 1 simultaneousoffers at good though varying terms are made to a number of agents in phase 2 offers must be made sequentially and their values are discontinuously lower they are close to the very lowest of all the outside options when the principal can repeatedly approach the same agent there is a multiplicity of equilibria in some of these the agents have the power to force delay they can hold off the principal s overtures temporarily but they must succumb in finite time in both models despite beingable to coordinate their actions agents cannot resist an invasion by the principal and hold to their best payoff it is in this sense that things eventually fall apart

competing for loyalty the dynamics of rallying support abstract we consider a class of dynamic collective action problems in which either a single principal or two competing principals vie for the support of members of a group we focus on the dynamic problem that emerges when agents negotiate and commit their support to principals sequentially we show that competition reduces agents welfare with public goods or if and only if there are positive externalities on uncommitted agents and increases agents welfare with public bads we apply the model to the study of corporate takeovers vote buying and exclusive deals jel d42 d62 d72 d82 g34 h41

naked exclusion an experimental study of contracts with externalities this paper reports the results of an experiment designed to assess the ability of an incumbent seller to profitably foreclose a market with exclusive contracts we use the strategic environment described by rasmusen ramseyer and wiley 1991 and segal and whinston 2000 where entry is unprofitable when sufficiently many downstream buyers sign exclusive contracts with the incumbent when discrimination is impossible the game resembles a stag hunt coordination game in which the buyers payoffs are endogenously chosen by the incumbent seller exclusion occurs when the buyers fail to coordinate on their preferred equilibrium two way non binding pre play communication among the buyers lowers the power of exclusive contracts and induces more generous contract terms from the seller when discrimination and communication are possible the exclusion rate rises divide and conquer strategies are observed more frequently when buyers can communicate with each other exclusion rates are significantly higher when the buyers payoffs are endogenously chosen rather than exogenously given finally secret offers are shown to decrease the incumbent s power to profitably exclude

exclusive contracts and demand foreclosure a firm may induce some customers to sign exclusive contracts in order to deprive a rival of the minimum viable size exclude it from the market and enjoy increased market power this strategy may result in socially inefficient exclusion even if the excluded firm is present at the contracting stage and can make counteroffers in addition allowing for breach penalty clauses decreases firms incentives to exclude rivals because such clauses allow a firm to use customers as a conduit for the transfer of another firm s profits

selling licences for a process innovation the impact of the product market on the selling mechanism this article considers the sale by a research lab of licences for a cost reducing innovation the marginal cost of a firm that wins a licence is private information and the acquisition of a licence imposes a negative externality on the other firms the lab s optimal revenue is determined from a class of mechanisms in which the lab selects the number of licences and the reserve price before the sale the role of the downstream product market in the determination of the number of licences is analyzed furthermore it is also shown that the optimal reserve price may be zero jel classification d82 li3

optimal border policies for invasive species under asymmetric information this paper analyzes the problem faced by a border protection agency if endogenous exporter abatement activities affect invasive species risk allowing for unobservable differences in abatement cost we show how the optimal inspection penalty regime differs from the symmetric information case departing from previous literature we allow for technical assistance a policy instrument specifically permitted and commonly employed under article 9 of the world trade organization sanitary and phytosanitary agreement we find the information asymmetry can make it optimal for the importing country to provide technical assistance grants for exporter risk abatement even if it would otherwise be inefficient further we show that fungibility of technical assistance with inputs in other sectors of the exporting economy affects the qualitative nature of optimal policy if technical assistance has no outside value in the exporter s country optimal policy is characterized by a menu of contracts balancing higher tariffs with lower penalties for being caught with an invasive if technical assistance can be used in other sectors of the exporter s economy it can introduce countervailing incentives making a uniform tariff penalty combination optimal

the allocation of future business dynamic relational contracts with multiple agents we consider how a firm dynamically allocates business among several suppliers to motivate them in a relational contract the firm chooses one supplier who exerts private effort output is non contractible and each supplier observes only his own relationship with the principal in this setting allocation decisions constrain the transfers that can be promised to suppliers in equilibrium consequently optimal allocation decisions condition on payoff irrelevant past performance to make strong incentives credible we construct a dynamic allocation rule that attains first best whenever any allocation rule does this allocation rule performs strictly better than any rule that depends only on payoff relevant information

on modelling the natural rate of unemployment with indivisible labour this analysis investigates modelling the natural rate of unemployment in settings where labour s utilization has some lumpy aspect to it specifically the introduction of various nonconvexities into tastes and technology lead to unemploy ment in general equilibrium equilibria can emerge where 1 those currently unemployed have higher probabilities of being unemployed in the future than those currently employed 2 some agents are jobless while others work overtime and 3 seniority rules seemingly arise whereby old workers cannot be laid off so long as either new workers are being hired or some workers are doing overtime the relative welfare levels of employed and unemployed agents are analysed

employment with asymmetric information in an economy without informational and other distortions entrepreneurs and workers can write labor contracts that support a pareto optimal allocation of resources this paper is an attempt to characterize contracts when enterpreneurs are better informed about the state of nature than are their workers asymmetric information generally results in a suboptimal allocation of both risk and worker effort in particular if consumption and leisure are perfect substitutes employment will be less than fully pareto optimal in all but the most favorable states of nature

contracting with externalities the paper studies inefficiencies arising in contracting between one principal and n agents when the utility of each agent depends on all agents trades with the principal when the principal commits to a set of publicly observable bilateral contract offers the arising inefficiency is due entirely to the externalities imposed on non signers in contrast when the principal s offers are privately observed the distortion is due to the externalities given agents equilibrium trades comparison of the two externalities determines the relative efficiency of the two contracting regimes in both cases we show that when n is large each agent can be treated as non pivotal provided that appropriate continuity assumptions are satisfied we also study the case in which the principal can condition each agent s trade on other agents messages we characterize the set of such mechanisms in which each agent s participation is voluntary when the principal can commit to any such mechanism she implements the first best outcome while threatening each deviator with the harshest possible punishment however in the presence of noise that goes to zero slower than n goes to infinity in the limit we obtain a generally inefficient outcome in which each agent feels non pivotal

can debt crises be self fulfilling abstract several papers argue that debt crises can be the result of self fulfilling expectations that no one will lend to a country triggering default and rationalizing the refusal to lend i show these coordination failures can be eliminated by a combination of state contingent securities and a mechanism that allows investors to promise to lend only if enough other investors do so as well this suggests that runs on the debt of a single borrower such as the government can be eliminated and that self fulfilling features are more plausible when externalities among many decentralized borrowers allow for economy wide debt runs to occur

why higher takeover premia protect minority shareholders posttakeover moral hazard by the acquirer and free riding by the target shareholders lead the former to acquire as few sharcs as necessary to gain control as moral hazard is most severe under such low ownership concentration inefficiencies arise in successful takeovers moreover share supply is shown to be upward sloping rules promoting ownership concentration limit both agency costs and the occurrence of takeovers furthermore higher takeover premia induced by competition translate into higher ownership concen tration and are thus beneficial finally one share one vote and simple majority are generally not optimal and socially optimal rules need not emerge through private contracting

the design of an optimal insurance policy almost every phase of economic behavior is affected by uncertainty the economic system has adapted to uncertainty by developing methods that facilitate the reallocation of risk among individuals and firms the most apparent and familiar form for shifting risks is the ordinary insurance policy previous insurance decision analyses can be divided into those in which the insurance policy was exogenously specified see john gould jan mossin and vernon smith and those in which it was not see karl borch 1960 and kenneth arrow 1971 1973 in this paper the pioneering work of borch and arrow the derivation of the optimal insurance contract form from the model is synthesized and extended

vertical contracting with informational opportunism we consider vertical contracting arrangements between a manufacturer and a retailing network when retailers have private information and the organization is run through bilateral contracts we highlight a new form of informational opportunism arising when the manufacturer manipulates information learned separately in each relationship we characterize the set of allocations robust to such opportunism by means of simple ex post incentive compatibility constraints those constraints limit the manufacturer s ability to use yardstick competition among retailers they simplify contracts and restore a rent efficiency trade off even with correlated information we show that sell out contracts are optimal under a wide range of circumstances

coordination and the provision of incentives to a common regulated firm abstract this paper considers the problem faced by two regulators in providing incentives to a common privately informed regulated firm under various degrees of coordination in the model the firm exerts effort toward cost reduction and self dealing and incentives can be input based monitoring and output based demanded cost targets full coordination between the regulators leads to the second best allocation a setting in which the regulators do not fully coordinate leads to i higher overall monitoring more aggressive input based incentives and ii higher demanded cost targets i e more lenience in terms of output based incentives as a consequence of i in all possible equilibria the effort toward cost reduction will be smaller when the agent reports to two regulators who do not coordinate i and ii imply that the impact on the effort toward self dealing activities is ambiguous in our leading example self dealing will be larger if the regulators coordinate on monitoring levels but smaller if they choose monitoring levels independently

technology adoption in the presence of network externalities we analyze technology adoption in industries where network externalities are significant the pattern of adoption depends on whether technologies are sponsored a sponsor is an entity that has property rights to the technology and hence is willing to make investments to promote it key findings include the following 1 compatibility tends to be undersupplied by the market but excessive standardization can occur 2 in the absence of sponsors the technology superior today has a strategic advantage and is likely to dominate the market 3 when one of two rival technologies is sponsored that technology has a strategic advantage and may be adopted even if it is inferior 4 when two competing technologies both are sponsored the technology that will be superior tomorrow has a strategic advantage

coordination and bargaining power in contracting with externalities abstract building on genicot and ray g genicot d ray contracts and externalities how things fall apart j econ theory 131 2006 71 100 we develop a model of non cooperative bargaining that combines the two main approaches in the literature of contracting with externalities the offer game in which the principal makes simultaneous offers to the agents and the bidding game in which the agents make simultaneous offers to the principal allowing for agent coordination we show that the outcome of our bargaining procedure may differ remarkably from those of the offer and the bidding games in particular we find that bargaining can break agents coordination and that the principal s payoff can be decreasing in his own bargaining power

disease forecasts and livestock health disclosure a shepherd s dilemma we analyze how to induce sellers to disclose food safety with repeated interactions and safety correlated over time cash transfers alone do not ensure disclosure perfect but costly testing ensures disclosure with a complex lottery that may be difficult to implement in practice in contrast even a noisy quality forecast allows the buyer to induce perfect disclosure with a simple pricing scheme forecast introduction may benefit or harm sellers after introduction sellers may suffer from increases in forecast precision as an illustration we cast our model in the context of rift valley fever in an east african livestock market copyright 2010 oxford university press

male female disparity in starting pay empirical studies of the earnings of male and female workers persistently reveal a gap that is unexplained by the economic variables in these models this gap has been given two interpretations in the literature one holds that the gap reflects non market forces which distort the equilibrium relation among the wages of competing workers discrimination according to this view prevents female workers from being offered jobs commensurate with their qualifications and crowds them into low productivity occupations 2 the alternative interpretation holds that some substantial portion of the gap is an artifact the result of missing variables biased parameters or measurement error these researchers view the labor market as highly competitive and were it possible to correct for all these statistical problems the measured wage gap would largely vanish 3 this research belongs to the latter category we argue that a portion of the measured gap at least that observed between the earnings of young men and women during their first few years with their employers reflects sex related differences in the shares of investment in firm specific human capital borne by workers of each group moreover these variations in investment levels are freely chosen by women and in no way imply long run deficits in their earning power on the contrary the model predicts steeper earnings profiles of women who undertake this firm specific investment thus women s earnings are predicted eventually to overtake and surpass those of equally qualified men this theory was developed in earlier research by becker and lindsay 2 based on a model of hashimoto 11 12 and extensions by parsons 21 we argued that young women for nondiscriminatory reasons elect to shoulder a larger share of this investment than young men the explanation for this is developed in two stages the first derives the terms under which both male and female workers share the investment with their employers the second argues that female workers will be led by these considerations to bear a larger share workers of both sexes agree to enter into inflexible wage contracts with employers specifying a share of the investment i e a wage deduction from current mvp and a post investment wage the advantage to such contracts lies in the solution to an assymetric information problem the

robust predictions for bilateral contracting with externalities the paper studies bilateral contracting between one principal and n agents when each agent s utility depends on the principal s unobservable contracts with other agents we show that allowing deviations to menu contracts from which the principal chooses bounds equilibrium outcomes in a wide class of bilateral contracting games without imposing ad hoc restrictions on the agents beliefs this bound yields for example competitive convergence as n in environments in which an appropriately defined notion of competitive equilibrium exists we also examine the additional restrictions arising in two common bilateral contracting games the offer game in which the principal makes simultaneous offers to the agents and the bidding game in which the agents make simultaneous offers to the principal

behavioral incentives equilibrium endemic disease and health management policy for farmed animals the article develops a dynamic capital valuation model in which farms can act with farm varying cost to increase the probability of avoiding an infectious endemic animal disease multiple endemic disease equilibria can exist and the one with the largest set of action takers is socially optimal costly capital markets are shown to be a factor in determining the extent of disease frictions such as dealing with a veterinary public health bureaucracy can enhance social welfare by encouraging precautionary biosecurity actions technical innovations can reduce social welfare and a disease indemnification scheme is also studied suggestions for empirical implementation are provided

pareto optima and competitive equilibria with adverse selection and moral hazard this paper explores the extent to which standard general equilibrium analysis of pareto optima and of competitive equilibria can be applied to environments with moral hazard and adverse selection problems allowing for lotteries contracts with random components we first establish that an adverse selection insurance economy a moral hazard insurance economy a signaling economy and a private information labor market economy are all special cases of a simple general structure we then show that techniques for characterizing pareto optimal contracts as solutions to concave programming problems are useful and nice and appear to be broadly applicable allowing for lotteries we show how to characterize the optimal allocations for the adverse selection insurance and labor market economies we then show that standard existence and optimality theorems for competitive equilibria apply in the linear space containing lotteries if agents with characteristics which are distinct and privately observed at the time of initial trading enter the economy wide resource constraints in a homogeneous way other kinds of diversity are not critical for economies with moral hazard which satisfy the homogeneity condition competitive contract markets single out a subset of the optima and thus can be consistent with apparent unemployment and with a random allocation of labor supplied though all households are averse to risk the adverse selection insurance and signaling economies however do not satisfy the homogeneity condition and are difficult to decentralize efficiently with a price system

a dynamic small open economy model with involuntary unemployment it is well known that real business cycle small open economy soe models rely on greenwood hercowitz and huffman 1988 preferences to match the countercyclical trade balance observed in open economies as well as other second moments while standard preferences a la king plosser and rebelo 1988 are commonly labelled ineffective owing to their inability to yield the countercyclical trade balance in this paper i show that an soe model with standard preferences and involuntary unemployment with efficient risk sharing can obtain a countercyclical trade balance and match main empirical regularities in small open economies il est bien connu que les modeles de cycles d affaires reels dans une petite economie ouverte peo comptent sur des preferences a la greenwood hercowitz et huffman 1988 pour etre compatibles avec la balance commerciale contre cyclique observee dans les economies ouvertes ainsi que sur d autres second moments alors que les preferences standards a la king plosser et rebelo 1988 sont considerees comme ineffectives a cause de leur inhabilitea engendrer la balance commerciale contre cyclique dans ce texte l auteur montre qu un modele de peo avec preferences standards et chomage involontaire et partage efficient du risque peut engendrer une balance commerciale contre cyclique et s arrimer aux principales regularites observees dans les petites economies ouvertes

vertical integration in the presence of upstream competition we analyse vertical integration when there is upstream competition and compare outcomes to the case where upstream assets are owned by a single agent i e upstream monopoly in so doing we make two contributions to the modelling of strategic vertical integration first we base industry structure namely the ownership of assets firmly within the property rights approach to firm boundaries second we model the potential multilateral negotiations using a fully specified non cooperative bargaining model designed to easily compare outcomes achieved under upstream competition and monopoly given this we demonstrate that vertical integration can alter the joint payoffs of integrating parties in ex post bargaining however this bargaining effect is stronger for firms integrating under upstream competition than upstream monopoly we also consider the potential for integration to internalise competitive externalities in manner that cannot be achieved under non integration we demonstrate that ex post monopolization is more likely to occur when there is an upstream monopoly than when there is upstream competition our general conclusion is that the simple intuition that the presence of upstream competition can mitigate and reduce the incentives for socially undesirable vertical integration is misplaced and depending upon the strength of downstream competition i e product differentiation the opposite could easily be the case journal of economic literature classification number l42

coordination and discrimination in contracting with externalities divide and conquer abstract the paper studies bilateral contracting between n agents and one principal whose trade with each agent generates externalities on other agents it examines the effects of prohibiting the principal from i coordinating agents on her preferred equilibrium and ii making different contracts available to different agents these effects depend on whether an agent is more or less eager to trade when others trade more the prohibitions reduce the aggregate trade in the former case and have little or no effect in the latter case the inefficiencies under different contracting regimes are linked to the sign of the relevant externalities and are shown to be typically reduced by both prohibitions

how strong are weak patents economists usually conceive of patents as property rights that prevent others from practicing the patenting technology unless they first obtain a license from the patent holder even for ironclad patents i e for patents that are certain to be valid the existing literature has shown that the analysis of equilibrium licensing contracts is surprising subtle and complex 1 for example the analysis is quite different depending upon whether one firm s licensing contract is observable to the other firms likewise equilibrium outcomes are quite different if royalties must be linear than in the case where two part tariffs and other non linear royalties are permitted in that literature a downstream firm that refuses to sign a contract with the upstream supplier either exits the industry in the case that the upstream supplier controls an essential input or must rely on more costly inputs in the case of a non essential input in other words the downstream firm s threat point is to use some backstop technology in practice however patents are issued after a brief examination by the patent office to see if they meet the statutory requirements for novelty and non obviousness mounting evidence indicates that many weak patents i e patents unlikely to be found valid if challenged in court are issued by the u s patent and trademark office uspto 2 some observers view this with great alarm arguing that uspto is handing out undeserved monopolies others by contrast have suggested that these weak patents are of little concern because they will have little commercial impact because they will be licensed at commensurately low royalty rates or not enforced at all we study the commercial impact of weak patents more precisely we define a patent s strength as the probability that it will be found valid if challenged in court and we examine the relationship between a patent s strength and the royalties that it can command the distinctive

confining the coase theorem contracting ownership and free riding if individuals own the right to take any action that they please and are free to contract about behaviour will outcomes be efficient in all situations that is does the coase theorem hold we study this classic question through the lens of a non cooperative model of contract negotiations considering both compulsory and voluntary participation in negotiations in either case we find that all consistent equilibria of the contracting game are efficient in the case of two players but if participation is voluntary and there are more than two players there are situations in which all consistent equilibria are inefficient specifically the provision of public goods tends to be inefficiently low due to strategic abstention from contracting free riding on others agreements can be avoided if individuals do not own all their actions when actions involve the use of assets efficient action ownership may correspond to collective rather than individual asset ownership

network effects and environmental externalities do clean technologies suffer from excess inertia abstract we study the diffusion of a clean substitute to a dirty durable in a dynamic model consumer utility of both durables increases in their respective market shares due to network effects first we characterize the optimal dirty good tax the tax should achieve a long run optimal division of the market between the two goods along the transition path to this steady state the optimal tax depends on the current and future market shares of the clean durable thus even if the marginal environmental damage from an additional dirty durable is constant the optimal tax should not be constant second we study whether excess inertia can occur if the emission tax is not optimally set we then find that a constant tax that only accounts for the environmental damage caused by the dirty good may lead to excess inertia excess inertia could happen even if the clean technology is proprietary and the technology owner has incentives to sponsor the initial market diffusion of the technology

how to license intangible property we examine the optimal licensing strategy of a research lab selling to firms who are product market competitors we consider an independent lab as well as a research joint venture we show that 1 demands are interdependent and hence the standard price mechanism is not the profit maximizing licensing strategy 2 the seller s incentives to develop the innovation may be excessive 3 the seller s incentives to disseminate the innovation typically are too low 4 larger ventures are less likely to develop the innovation and more likely to restrict its dissemination in those cases where development occurs and 5 a downstream firm that is not a member of the research venture is worse off as a result of the innovation

an optimal auction with identity dependent externalities we analyze the problem of a seller of multiple identical units of a good who faces a set of buyers with unit demands private information and identity dependent externalities we derive the seller s optimal mechanism and characterize its main properties we show that the probability that a buyer obtains a unit is an increasing function of the externalities he generates and enjoys also the seller s allocation of the units of the good need not be ex post efficient as an illustration we apply the model to the problem faced by a developer of a shopping mall who wants to allocate and price its retail space among anchor and non anchor stores we show that a commonly used sequential mechanism is not optimal unless externalities are large enough

market failures and public policy industrial organization studies the exercise and control of market power to this purpose it builds models that capture the essence of the situation the predictions of the model can then be tested econometrically and possibly in the lab or the field in the end the reasonableness of and robustness to modeling assumptions and the quality of empirical fit determine how confident economists are in making recommendations to public decision makers for intervention and to companies for the design of their business model industrial organization has a long tradition first theoretical with the work of french engineer economists antoine augustin cournot 1838 and jules dupuit 1844 then policy oriented with the enactment of the sherman act 1890 and subsequent legislation then descriptive with the studies of the harvard school structure conduct performance comforting and refining the antitrust drive and finally skeptical with the chicago school the chicago school correctly pointed out the lack of underlying theoretical doctrine and went on to cast doubt on the whole edifice it however did not develop an alternative antitrust doctrine perhaps because

a dynamic equilibrium model of inflation and unemployment a stochastic general equilibrium model is constructed which is capable of examining the covariance properties between inflation and unemployment both conditioned and unconditioned upon the state o

nash in nash bargaining a microfoundation for applied work a nash equilibrium in nash bargains has become the workhorse bargaining model in applied analyses of bilateral oligopoly this paper proposes a non cooperative foundation for nash in nash bargaining that extends the rubinstein 1982 model to multiple upstream and downstream rms assuming there exists gains from trade for each rm pair we prove that there exists an equilibrium with immediate agreement and negotiated prices that correspond to rubinstein prices if and only if the marginal contribution of a set of agreements is weakly greater than the sum of the agreements marginal contributions we provide stronger conditions under which equilibrium prices are unique

the theory of moral hazard and unobservable behaviour part i principal agent models are studied in which outcomes conditional on the agent s action are uncertain and the agent s behaviour therefore unobservable for a model with bounded agent s utility conditions are given under which the first best equilibrium can be approximated arbitrarily closely by contracts relating payment to observable outcomes for general models it is shown that the solution may not always be obtained by using the agent s first order conditions as constraint general conditions of lagrangean type are given for problems in which contracts are finite dimensional 1 the moral hazard situation

strategic interactions among private and public efforts when preventing and stamping out a highly infectious animal disease upon the outbreak of a contagious animal disease a primary motive for restoring disease free status is often to regain access to international product markets efforts applied toward continuing or regaining such access generate a public good all growers benefit regardless of the extent of private effort taken while exclusion is impractical private incentives to take preventive measures and stamp out effort interact in complex ways there are intra farm temporal interactions and also inter farm contemporaneous interactions public effort also takes place and interacts with private effort this paper provides a succinct multi agent model to explore these interactions in social optimum and in nash equilibrium and also to explore how socially optimal and nash behavior differ comparative statics under social optimality are more straightforward than under nash equilibrium whether it is in social optimum or nash equilibrium public prevention effort complements both private prevention and private stamp out efforts however public stamp out effort substitutes for both private stamp out and private prevention efforts reasonable conditions are identified under which nash levels of private prevention and stamp out efforts are both below socially optimal levels concerning policy prescriptions secure property rights and low property transfer costs should promote prevention and eradication efforts other things being equal public prevention effort should be more effective at improving welfare than comparable public stamp out effort subsidies on private effort should favor prevention because subsidies on eradication effort may discourage prevention effort even if products from diseased animals are safe to consume and acceptable to consumers it may be optimal to destroy them

asymmetric information bargaining problems with many agents a yes or no decision must be made about some issue all agents must agree the coase theorem asserts that the efficient outcome will always result suppose the value positive or negative that an individual attaches to an affirmative decision is privately known to that individual it is proved under very mild conditions that with independent types as the number of agents increases the probability of an affirmative efficient decision goes to zero an example in which it is common knowledge that an affirmative decision is efficient and yet the probability of such a decision goes to zero is given

screening contracts in the presence of positive network effects abstract based on the critical assumption of complementarity this paper builds a general model to describe and solve the screening problem faced by a monopolist seller of a network good by applying strict monotone comparative statics we demonstrate that the joint presence of asymmetric information and positive network effects leads to a strict downward distortion from the welfare maximizing allocation for all consumers we also show that the equilibrium allocation is an increasing function of network effect intensity

endogenous games and mechanisms side payments among players we characterize the outcomes of games when players may make binding offers of strategy contingent side payments before the game is played this does not always lead to efficient outcomes despite complete information and costless contracting the characterizations are illustrated in a series of examples including voluntary contribution public good games cournot and bertrand oligopoly principal agent problems and commons games among others

insurability and moral hazard in agricultural insurance markets pareto optimal and constrained pareto optimal all risk insurance contracts are studied conditions required for emergence of competitive insurance markets are isolated and discussed full insurance contracts are shown to be dominated by contracts involving coinsurance and deductibles if insurers are pseudo risk averse the effect of moral hazard on all risk agricultural insurance indemnity schedules is examined results for indemnity schedules under moral hazard and constant absolute risk aversion show that providing farmers with the incentives to take appropriate actions may imply lower deductibles in the presence of moral hazard than in the absence of moral hazard

self protection strategic interactions and the relative endogeneity of disease risks self protection is a key behavior that influences infectious disease risks spillovers in disease protection create different types of strategic interactions under certain conditions multiple nash equilibria may arise with the possibility of coordination failure involving excessively low self protection in which case individuals expectations of others efforts determine which outcome arises in prior studies assumed technical relations between self protection and infection probabilities drove the strategic interactions we demonstrate that strategic relations can be endogenously determined and depend on the relative endogeneity of risk rer defined here as the degree to which individuals can take control of their own risks in a strategic setting the potential for coordination failure may arise when rer is sufficiently small whereas larger levels of rer may eliminate this possibility to ensure larger levels of self protection we find that imposing a behaviorally dependent indemnity may increase rer to eliminate the possibility of coordination failure we apply our analysis to the problem of livestock disease and illustrate the theory using a numerical example of the 2001 united kingdom foot and mouth disease epidemic

erratum to multilateral trade negotiations bilateral opportunism and the rules of gatt wto abstract trade negotiations occur through time and between the governments of many countries an important issue is thus whether the value of concessions that a government wins in a current negotiation may be eroded in a future bilateral negotiation to which it is not party we identify rules of negotiation that serve to protect the welfare of governments that are not participating in the bilateral negotiation our main finding is that the two central principles of gatt wto nondiscrimination mfn and reciprocity preserve the welfare of nonparticipating governments and therefore offer a first line of defense against bilateral opportunism

country solidarity in sovereign crises when will solidarity which emerges spontaneously from the fear of spillovers be reinforced through contracting the optimal pact between countries that differ substantially in their probability of distress is a simple debt contract with market financing a borrowing cap but no joint liability while joint liability augments total surplus the borrowing country cannot compensate the deep pocket guarantor by contrast the optimal pact between two countries symmetrically exposed to shocks with an arbitrary correlation is a simple debt contract with joint liability provided that shocks are sufficiently independent spillovers sufficiently large liquidity needs moderate and available sanctions sufficiently tough

livestock disease indemnity design when moral hazard is followed by adverse selection averting or limiting the outbreak of infectious disease in domestic livestock herds is an economic and potential human health issue that involves the government and individual livestock producers producers have private information about preventive biosecurity measures they adopt on their farms prior to outbreak ex ante moral hazard and following outbreak they possess private information about whether or not their herd is infected ex post adverse selection we investigate how indemnity payments can be designed to provide incentives to producers to invest in biosecurity and report infection to the government in the presence of asymmetric information we compare the relative magnitude of the first and second best levels of biosecurity investment and indemnity payments to demonstrate the tradeoff between risk sharing and efficiency and we discuss the implications for status quo u s policy

vertical tax competition and consumption externalities in a federation with lobbying abstract we consider a federation with two layers of government in which leviathan policy makers levy an excise tax on a consumption good that generates a negative externality and that is produced in an imperfectly competitive market when both layers of government are allowed to tax policy choices are affected also by vertical tax competition in this setting tax policy in general is not efficient we then examine how special interest groups may influence tax policy by lobbying the policy makers we find that depending on market structure and on the level of the externality lobbying can improve efficiency and that tax base sharing by two layers of government can be more efficient than taxation by a single layer