tripartite income employment contracts and coalition incentive compatibility tripartite contracts between workers a firm and an insurance broker pareto dominate the usual bilateral arrangements if coalitions are not feasible they do this by allowing the broker to run surpluses over a reservation expected utility in some states and deficits in others we show that these contracts are manipulable by coalitions this motivates our main contribution the definition and characterization of coalition incentive compatible tripartite contracts we then ask whether broker intermediation can still be useful the answer is that not every coalition incentive compatibility requirement annuls the critical budget breaking property specifically if firm broker coalitions are feasible there is no three party contract that is coalition incentive compatible and pareto superior to bilateral firm worker contracts except in the extreme case where the workers demand for leisure is income inelastic but if only a firm worker coalition can form the addition of a broker to a bilateral arrangement does reduce the welfare losses caused by the existence of asymmetric information

advertising and prices as signals of quality in a regime of price rivalry abstract this paper addresses the issue of whether firms use price or advertising to signal quality and whether advertising has pro or anti competitive effects we show that when there is price rivalry advertising may be necessary to signal quality in contrast to single firm models signaling through price alone prevails for sufficient inter brand quality differentials joint price advertising signals prevail when the quality differential is small finally advertising in the form of variable rather than fixed costs is shown to increase the feasibility of signaling quality

stopping agents from cheating abstract when a principal hires two or more agents to work in a correlated environment each agent s reward will depend on the other s performance unfortunately with just the usual optimal incentive constrained contracts being offered the agents strictly prefer to play equilibrium strategies other than those desired by the principal they cheat however the principal can use a more subtle contractual mechanism to stop them from cheating at no extra cost this mechanism uses one agent to police the other and exploits certain properties of the optimal contracts

what went wrong with the recent reforms in the southern cone this paper describes and interprets the outcome of the reform packages in chile argentina and uruguay during 1974 83 it is shown that all three countries experienced initial success with the rescue operation from the severe macroeconomic disequilibrium at the inception of the reforms the paper then discusses the areas in which the reforms were successful and why the countries experienced boom bust cycles resulting in large increases in external indebtedness and internal financial crises the paper attributes the failure of the reforms to a combination of policy inconsistencies implementation difficulties and market frictions jointly these factors generated a sustained appreciation of the real exchange rate and a large spread between the cost of dollar denominated and peso denominated loans in turn the appreciation and interest rate difference created protracted opportunities for arbitrage that distracted firms from the business of production

cost allocation revisited an optimality result the resource manager of a firm is faced with capacity and pricing decisions with regard to a congestion prone system such as computer communication facilities difficulties arise since the manager is uninformed of the system demand when the capacity decision is to be made a game theoretic model is developed to analyze the effects of different accounting rules on the elicitation of relevant information and ex post efficiency in acquisition and allocation decisions the key result is that the cost allocation method aided by an anonymous reporting scheme is indeed as asserted by zimmerman zimmerman j 1979 the costs and benefits of cost allocations accounting rev 54 july 504 521 a full information efficient rule achieving optimality both in acquisition and allocation decisions discussions of the main assumptions underlying this result are provided

a common agency with incomplete information in the present article i demonstrate that forming a common agency by oligopolistic firms may not be to their advantage if agents have access to private information about their costs bernheim and whinston 1985 1986 pointed out that a common agency allows the firms to sustain the collusive outcome by giving them a vehicle to internalize the externality generated by their pricing or output decisions if agents have access to private information the advantage pointed out by bernheim and whinston may be more than outweighed by the possible existence of an informational disadvantage specifically if the unit costs of different potential agents are correlated the firm may be more successful in extracting the informational rents of its agent if it contracts with an independent agent and not with the same agent as its rival firm when oligopolistic firms contract with independent agents the revenues of one firm reveal implicit information about the unit costs of agents serving competing firms in the same industry however if the unit costs of different agents are correlated revenues also reflect information about the unit cost of the firm s own agent this additional information transmitted by revenues cannot be controlled by the agent s reporting behavior as a result if the firm conditions its agent s payoff upon revenues it can limit the informational rents that this agent can secure due to the existence of private information this possibility of limiting its agent s informational rents is eliminated if the firm contracts with the same agent as its rivals with a common agency the agent can manipulate the reports delivered to all the firms thus reducing the options available to each of them various patterns of agency relationship exist in markets where oligopolistic producers

price dependent profit sharing as a channel coordination device we show how an upstream firm by using a price dependent profit sharing rule can prevent destructive competition between downstream firms that produce relatively close substitutes with this rule the upstream firm induces the retailers to behave as if demand has become less price elastic as a result competing downstream firms will maximize aggregate total channel profit when downstream firms are better informed about demand conditions than the upstream firm the same outcome cannot be achieved by vertical restraints such as resale price maintenance price dependent profit sharing may also ensure that the downstream firms undertake efficient market expanding investments the model is consistent with observations from the market for content commodities distributed by mobile networks

on the existence of franchise contracts and some of their implications abstract we characterize the franchising problem as a contractual agreement between a principal and multiple agents the contract contains a revenue sharing rule the level of national expenditures by the franchisor and the number of units to be enfranchised the franchisor offers the contract to a group of potential agents whose attitudes toward risk and effort differ the revenue of a franchise unit is determined by decisions of both parties as well as a random perturbation under certain conditions we establish the existence and uniqueness of an expected utility maximizing franchise contract with the property that the royalty payment to the franchisor never exceeds one half the revenue we provide an explanation for the use of a common contract and argue that in reality it is non linear we show that this common non linear contract attracts agents deemed desirable by the franchisor

mechanism design with incomplete information a solution to the implementation problem the main result of this paper is that the multiple equilibrium problem in mechanism design can be avoided in private value models if agents do not use weakly dominated strategies in equilibrium we show that in such settings any incentive compatible allocation can be made the unique equilibrium outcome to a mechanism we derive a general necessary condition for unique implementation which implies that the positive result for private value models applies with considerably less generality to common value settings and to situations in which an agent s information does not index the agent s preferences

moral hazard with several agents abstract we consider a situation in which a principal hires two agents whose cooperation is technically profitable and study three models that incorporate different assumptions about the agents cooperative behavior we find a close relationship between the agents commitment capacity and the characteristics of the optimal contract a greater capacity to cooperate leads to more efficient outcomes we also show that unless agents form a team the efficient level of mutual help is not achieved in equilibrium

optimal contracts with public ex post information abstract we are concerned with the value of public ex post information about a seller s costs to an initially uninformed buyer we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for a public ex post signal s s that is correlated with the risk neutral seller s costs to render the initial information asymmetry inconsequential to the buyer the first best outcome for the buyer is shown to be feasible if 1 the dimension of s is at least that of or 2 the conditional likelihood function of s given is for one of its realizations sj a strictly increasing function of and more concave in than is the seller s cost function

financial fragility and over the counter markets abstract this paper studies the interaction between financial fragility and over the counter otc markets i model the financial sector as a large number of investors divided into different groups which i interpret as financial institutions and a large number of dealers financial institutions and dealers trade assets in an otc market a la duffie et al 2005 and lagos and rocheteau 2009 investors receive privately observed preference shocks and financial institutions use the balanced team mechanism proposed by athey and segal 2013 to implement an efficient risk sharing arrangement among their investors when the market is liquid in the sense that search and bargaining are small frictions i show that the economy is likely to have a unique equilibrium and therefore is not fragile when these frictions are severe a run equilibrium exists investors announce low valuation of assets because they believe everyone else in their financial institution is doing the same conditional on bank runs existing the welfare impact of the search friction is ambiguous during runs trade is inefficient and as a result a friction that reduces trade during runs has the potential to improve welfare this result is in sharp contrast with the existing literature which suggests that search friction has a negative impact on welfare

delay cost and incentive schemes for multiple users this paper examines the role of cost application in the presence of delay and agency costs two risk neutral division managers share a common production facility and decide on a the demand usage rates and b productive action each division manager causes costly delays at the common production facility for the other division manager the expected delay depends on the demand rates chosen by the division managers an m g 1 queuing framework is used to characterize delay costs the unobservability of demand rates leads to stochastic choice hazard and the unobservability of productive actions leads to moral hazard problems the headquarters designs incentive schemes such that the use of the common facility is optimal for the firm we show that a franchise contract is necessary to implement the first best solution similar to harris and raviv 1979 but is not sufficient specifically when the action aversion of one division manager is small the use of a franchise contract leads to greedy behaviour by the that division manager the cost application required is greater than the expected marginal cost of delay to preclude the greedy behavior and ensure a stable equilibrium

x inefficiency competition and market information whether competition forces firms toward efficient behaviour is an open question we consider a duopoly with firms run by managers and affected by adverse selection on costs in contrast to recent literature we point out that to have a genuine effect on firm x inefficiency competition must change managerial incentives by introducing the availability of some signal on the rivals behaviour we show that if costs are correlated the contractual use of that signal can render private managerial information uninfluential this result stresses the informational role of the market and suggests scope for future work

the argentine stabilization plan of december 20th abstract in this paper an analytical model is developed to incorporate the essential characteristics of the stabilization plan implemented in argentina in january 1979 the model is based upon a set of simplifying assumptions that only approximate the complexity of the real world it is assumed that the expectations of inflation and the degree of excess demand or supply in the non traded goods market are the main intermediate determinants of the rate of inflation in that market the rate of change of prices of traded goods being determined by the external inflation together with the rate of devaluation treating thus the external rate of inflation as exogenous the only instrument available for influencing the rate of inflation in the long run is the rate of devaluation since the model assumes a fixed exchange rate regime the money supply is endogenous and hence unsuitable as an instrument of economic policy

the expectations management approach to stabilization in argentina during 1976 1982 abstract the main goals of the economic authorities in argentina during 1976 1982 were to open the economy to foreign trade and to reduce inflation the stabilization plan relied first on the control of money and wages later on a preannounced schedule of a declining future exchange rate actions that were supposed to be accompanied by a fiscal policy to reduce the public sector deficit the stabilization plan was abandoned in the first quarter of 1981 for two reasons an important financial crisis during the second quarter of 1980 and a deterioration of fiscal discipline that could no longer assure coherence between the deficit and the preannouncement schedule the paper also argues that the political situation in argentina undermined the credibility of the reforms and particularly the stabilization attempts with the abandonment of the stabilization schedule new commercial and exchange rate measures were gradually introduced reversing the policy of opening the economy to foreign trade the financial reform was reversed in 1982 with the virtual nationalization of deposits the experience of argentina suggests that capital inflows responding to interest rate arbitrage play a fundamental role in the short run dynamics of real exchange rates they can promote the adjustment or they can precipitate a run on the foreign exchange market the lesson is that a stabilization plan based on the preannouncement of future exchange rates is highly risky for an economy like argentina s

the market for knowledge brokers a widely used policy to diminish the market failure on the market for innovations is the provision of rd ii obtaining research proposals iii monitoring the research efforts and iv disseminating the research results it can be expected that creation of such a market yields a better match between demand and supply on the market for r d yields a higher quality research product for a given price and that it increases the dissemination of research results

incentives in principal agent relationships this article identifies some of the major issues that have been examined in the literature on incentives the article begins by discussing the frictions that lie at the heart of incentive problems next the principal s optimal response to these frictions is explored taking as given the characteristics of the agents with whom the principal interacts in a nonrepeated setting the design of individualized contracts contests and tournaments is analyzed then the principal s task of selecting the best agent is addressed and repeated agency relationships are considered

incentive schemes with multiple agents and bankruptcy constraints abstract we explore the effects of bankruptcy constraints on incentive schemes when two risk neutral agents operate in correlated environments our focus is on the subgame equilibrium in which each agent is induced via a direct mechanism to truthfully reveal his private information as a nash response to truth telling by his counterpart we identify a class of examples in which in contrast to the case where the agents are risk averse the nash constraints induce a subgame dominant strategy equilibrium thus implementation via direct mechanisms is feasible for this class more generally however the truth telling nash equilibrium may be subgame dominated so the question of implementation via direct mechanisms remains a delicate one

the role of expectations in stabilization policy abstract this paper develops and tests a theory of the process by which private agents in an economy form expectations about government policy agents form and update their beliefs about the true state of government policy in a bayesian fashion the credibility of a policy is defined to be the subjective probability that the government is pursuing a reform policy rule the credibility of a reform of monetary or exchange rate policies is a function of the parameters of both monetary and fiscal policies the theory is applied to the chilean and argentine exchange reforms of the late 1970 s

quasi robust multiagent contracts a criticism of mechanism design theory is that the optimal mechanism designed for one environment can produce drastically different actions outcomes and payoffs in a second even slightly different environment in this sense the theoretically optimal mechanisms usually studied are not robust to study robust mechanisms while maintaining an expected utility maximization approach we study a multiagent model in which the mechanism must be designed before the environment is as well understood as is usually assumed the particular model is of an auction setting with binary private values our main result is that if the prior belief about the correlation in the agents values is diffuse enough the optimal bayesian nash auction must also satisfy dominant strategy incentive constraints furthermore when the optimal auction does provide dominant strategy incentives it takes one of two forms i if perfect correlation and negative correlation are excluded as possibilities the auction incorporates all information about the prior belief over the possible correlations and ii if either perfect correlation or negative correlation is a possibility the auction does not incorporate any correlation information and can be described as a modified vickrey auction

implications of power when the ceo can pressure the cfo to bias reports abstract building on archival anecdotal and survey evidence on managers roles in accounting manipulations i develop an agency model to examine the effects of a ceo s power to pressure a cfo to bias a performance measure like earnings this power has implications for incentive compensation reporting quality firm value and information rents predictions from the model provide potential explanations for the differing results from recent empirical studies on the impact of regulatory interventions like sox and the extent to which the ceo s or cfo s incentives significantly impact on earnings management the model also identifies conditions under which either a powerful or a non powerful ceo can extract rents which can help explain mixed empirical results on the association between ceo power and excessive compensation

a game theoretic approach to behavioral food risks the case of grain producers abstract food risks may be caused by malpractice of suppliers who exploit the fact that their production processes and resulting product properties cannot be directly observed by buyers the probability of malpractice increases with the profits that can be earned through opportunistic behavior in this paper we develop a moral hazard model for the empirical analyses of behavioral risks it accounts for the essential fact that incomplete inspection and tracing increase the profitability of rule breaking behavior and that monitoring tracing and sanctioning are costly using the model we first demonstrate how to design efficient contracts in various situations in a case study we then analyze farmers incentives with regard to the minimum waiting period after fungicide use data are gathered in interviews with three large scale german farmers and a grain dealer we find that while their perception of parameters varies widely high temptations for rule breaking arise in some cases we conclude that empirical moral hazard analyses have significant potential to shed light on behavioral risks

price stabilization as a bonding mechanism in new equity issues abstract underwriters have an incentive to overstate investor interest in order to persuade some investors to purchase shares at a price in excess of their initial estimate of the fair value we show that this incentive is eliminated when the underwriter commits to secondary market price stabilization destroying the underwriter s incentive to overstate interest reduces the total surplus captured by initial investors in initial public offerings further efficiency gains are associated with penalty bid systems that permit the underwriter to make the stabilization commitment selectively price stabilization can thus be viewed as a bonding mechanism that improves the efficiency of the primary equity market

the loan contract mechanism of financial control industry banking the style of banking under which a single bank satisfies all the external financial needs of an industry was recognised by alfred marshall i9i9 as a positive force in the development of new industries today many of marshall s reference industries have reached maturity but their industry banks continue to play an active role not only in financing their production and expansion but also in their management cable i985 prais 198i to understand the economic impact of industry banking this paper explores one aspect of it bank directed industry coordination and control

flexibility and economic progress we start with a paradox that while its value and the penalties imposed by its absence are casually acknowledged in discussions of economic development there is a near total absence of explicit analytical treatment of the flexibility of economies in the academic literature at the same time there appears a strong prima facie expectation that the flexibility of an economy will strongly influence its long term economic performance and that this attribute is of increasing importance

awarding monopoly franchises the authors analyze how to award a monopoly franchise when the objective is to maximize expected consumers surplus net of transfer payments to the producer potential producers initially possess independent private information about uncertain production costs only the chosen producer subsequently observes realized production costs after awarding the franchise to the producer with the lowest expected costs prices are optimally set above realized marginal cost these ex post distortions foster more competitive bidding ex ante the distortions for any bid cost pair are invariant to the number of bidders n though expected distortions and profits decline with n copyright 1987 by american economic association

unique implementation of incentive contracts with many agents in this paper we consider the problem of implementation when a principal hires many agents and is not able to monitor their actions we distinguish two cases i when actions are mutually observable among agents ii when actions are not observable at all in i there is a mechanism in which the first best arises as a unique perfect equilibrium in ii we show by two examples that typically there are multiple equilibria if the principal merely offers a set of optimal sharing rules however we prove that the principal can use these optimal sharing rules as a starting point and construct a multi stage mechanism that has a unique second best perfect bayesian equilibrium

insurance premium allocation and loss prevention in a large firm a principal agent analysis abstract faced with increased insurance costs large firms are turning to a more systematic allocation of premium costs to subsidiaries an approach which capitalizes on economies of scale in a corporate wide management of aggregated risks risk pooled across divisions as well as subsidiaries such practice however raises a number of problems i what part of the aggregate risk should the firm self insure ii how should premium costs be allocated between subsidiaries iii how much effort should subsidiaries invest in loss prevention programs and how should they manage claims i e co insure themselves iv how can the parent firm induce managers of subsidiaries to control subsidiaries risk thereby reducing future premium payments and moral hazard or what premium incentive scheme can the firm devise to penalize or compensate subsidiaries investing less than an optimal effort in loss prevention to deal with these problems a conceptual framework based on a principal agents analysis and the definition of a liability account for each subsidiary is developed which is used to reduce the problems of moral hazard due to a less than perfect or indirect monitoring system specifically assumption regarding the premium allocation incentive scheme are made and explicit solutions are obtained for the control of subsidiaries loss prevention effort allocation

taxing the multinational enterprise on the forced redesign of global value chains and other inefficiencies the taxation of the multinational enterprise mne has been a continuing concern for policymakers we argue that the changing nature of the mobile mne e g its improved ability to fine slice the value chain and disperse it geographically makes it increasingly important to rethink current tax policies first there should be more focus on the inefficiencies that arise when taxation leads to the inefficient location of mne activities thus mnes may shift activities to low tax jurisdictions that offer lucrative pecuniary and non pecuniary incentives but do not enable their investments to maximize their contribution to global value creation second international tax regimes should ensure that mnes pay for their consumption of local public goods and public finance scholars have long known that the taxation based distortions are minimized when the tax objects are immobile however the bulk of current tax policies are aimed at corporate profits that are both poor proxies for the consumption of local public goods as well as extremely mobile integrating theory from international business public finance and economic geography our analysis demonstrates that moving the incidence of taxation from corporate profits to dividends and consumption would unambiguously improve both wealth creation and efficiency

research joint ventures and optimal r d policy with asymmetric information abstract when to allow research joint ventures rjvs or not is an important instrument in the development of an optimal r d policy the regulator however is unlikely to know all the relevant information to regulate r d optimally the extent to which there exist appropriability problems between the firms is one such variable that is private information to the firms in the industry in a duopoly setting we analyze the characteristics of a second best r d policy where the government can either allow rjvs or not and give lump sum subsidies to the parties involved the second best r d policy without subsidies will either block some welfare improving rjvs or allow some welfare reducing ones with lump sum subsidies the second best policy trades off the expected subsidy cost with allowing welfare decreasing rjvs or blocking welfare increasing ones

credibility and the dynamics of disinflation in open economies a note on the southern cone experiments abstract when people lack confidence in the ability of politicians to carry out a newly announced disinflationary policy disinflation becomes more difficult to achieve numerous writers have emphasized the importance of policy consistency for establishing credibility this essay suggests in addition that policies with a quicker disinflationary impact become more credible sooner and thus have a better chance of succeeding with that proposition in mind the objective is to examine and compare the initial impacts of alternative disinflationary strategies in an open economy with capital mobility using evidence from the southern cone experience with preannounced exchange rates for illustrative purposes

implementation with incomplete information in exchange economies in this paper we analyze the problem of designing incentive compatible mechanisms in pure exchange economic environments when agents have incomplete information the equilibrium concept employed is bayesian nash equilibrium and the notion of implemantation is full implementation which is stronger than the more commonly employed notion of truthful implementation an allocation rule is truthfully implementable if there exists a direct mechanism to which truth telling is an equilibrium and which yields the allocation rule as its truthful equilibrium outcome an allocation rule is fully implementable if there exists mechanism which yields the allocation rule as its unique equilibrium outcome more generally a set of allocation rules or a social choice set is fully implementable if there exist a mechanism whose equilibrium outcomes coincide with the set this stronger notion of implemention avoids the well known problems of multiple equilibria which arise in direct revelation games we develop a condition termed bayesian monotonicity which we show is necessary for full implementation an incentive compatibility condition is also necessary we prove that bayesian monotonicity and a slightly stronger incentive compatibility condition are sufficient for full implementation when there are at least three agents we present several examples of allocation rules which do and do not satisfy our condition one example is that of an allocation rule which is fully inplementable by an indirect mechanism but for which every equivalent direct mechanism has multiple equilibrium outcomes

dynamic risk sharing with two sided moral hazard abstract a group of risk averse agents repeatedly produce a perishable consumption good individual outputs are observable but efforts are not the contracting problem admits a recursive formulation and the optimal value function is the fixed point of a contraction mapping when the agents can be punished to the full extent in a single period every continuation contract of an optimal contract is itself optimal the marginal utility ratio between one agent and another is a submartingale the results imply that it is in general important to restrict an agent whose moral hazard constraint is binding from saving through another agent within the risk sharing group limited commitment and long run implications of optimal contracting are also examined

collusion and noncontrollable cost allocation controllability is often alleged to be an important consideration in constructing a managerial accounting system for performance evaluation practically all cost accounting textbooks recommend that a manager s evaluation should be confined to performance aspects that he can directly influence in the time period under consideration in contrast to this recommendation however firms allocate fixed and other joint costs to various departments even though such costs are apparently not controllable by department heads for example reece and cool indicated that 40 of 594 surveyed companies calculated income the same way for both internal decision and control purposes and for external reporting purposes and more than half of the remaining 60 also allocated corporate administrative expenses to calculate income for managerial purposes 2 not much is known about why companies continue to allocate those seemingly noncontrollable costs for internal decision and control purposes even though such allocations are apparently inconsistent with the concept of responsibility accounting 3 this study provides one possible

household energy elasticities and policy implications for pakistan abstract this study estimates fuel expenditure and price elasticities of household fuels in pakistan the burning of biomass is harmful to health and the environment and may cause preventable morbidity and mortality it is important to investigate how households fuel choices are linked to prices so that governments can consider appropriate steps to enhance the consumption of clean fuels using three pooled cross sectional surveys from pakistan and applying the linear approximate almost ideal demand system la aids model we found that all fuel types except natural gas were price inelastic at the national level and for urban households in rural areas natural gas and lpg were found to be more price elastic compared to urban areas simple policy simulations based on our results suggest that in order to reduce indoor air pollution by encouraging the adoption of clean fuels lpg and piped natural gas governments should subsidies clean fuels rather than imposing taxes on solid fuels moreover in the case of pakistan a subsidy for lpg should be preferred over a subsidy for piped natural gas as it produces a more cost effective reduction in solid fuel use

determinants of the amount and type of corruption in state fiscal bureaucracies an analysis of late imperial china a principal agent model of relations between rulers and state officials is used to derive several propositions concerning the amount and type of corruption in state bureaucracies the model is appl

ignorance in a multi agent setting abstract i extend the demski and sappington 1984 model to the case where the agents are with some exogenous probability ignorant i show that an ignorant agent either is not exposed to risk or he receives a lower transfer when the other agent is the informed type the principal wants to discourage choosing the contract designed for an ignorant agent

limited liability contracts between principal and agent abstract the optimal strategy of the principal is examined in an environment where there are ex post limitations on the maximum penalty that can be imposed on a riskneutral agent contrary to the case in which such limitations are not imposed it is in the principal s interest to deliberately forego the opportunity to induce socially efficient behavior and to instead design a contract that induces the agent to realize an efficient outcome only in the most productive state of nature and perhaps in certain very unproductive states the properties of the contract are examined in detail

subgame perfect implementation this paper examines the use of stage mechanisms in implementation problems and provides a partial characterization of the set of subgam e perfect implementable choice rules it is shown that in many economic environments virtually an y choice rule can be implemented to illustrate the power of this approach the paper discusses a number of models in which it is possible to implement the first best although it wouldn t have been possible to do so without using stage mechanisms the diversity of these models suggests that subgame perfect implementation may find wide application copyright 1988 by the econometric society

socially optimal procurement with tight budgets and rationing abstract we investigate the behaviour of a social planner that secures the supply of a good e g an environmental benefit through contracting with private agents while the social planner seeks to maximise net social benefits she is also controlled with a fixed budget private agents are profit maximising and hold private information concerning their variable costs of production they also have known fixed costs of contracting we find that budget constraints and fixed costs change the optimal contract design in more than one way the social planner minimises costs rations high cost contracts to reduce fixed costs and information rents and distorts contracts for all agent types including low cost agents we find that rationing improves social welfare also even though social costs including tax distortion are explicitly taken into consideration they do not affect the design of optimal contracts when budgets are tight in those cases the budget constraint dominates the solution

moral hazard in corporate investment and the disciplinary role of voluntary capital rationing this paper compares three capital budgeting rules the npv rule a high hurdle rate and capital rationing and explains why some firms may voluntarily impose capital rationing under both capital rationing and a high hurdle a restrictive investment criterion is used to control managerial shirking however implementation of these budgeting rules requires a mechanism to prevent the firm from expanding the investment scale ex post capital rationing in the form of a predetermined fixed budget differs from the high hurdle rate rule in that the former requires the firm to overcome the cost of raising additional capital before making further investment

stabilization policies in developing countries what have we learned abstract the paper reviews the recent experience with stabilization programmes in latin america in the light of traditional and monetarist models of inflation and the exchange rate the traditional model links both inflation and payments problems to budget deficits the monetarist model too believes that inflation is caused by fiscal deficits but it takes a more optimistic view of stabilization full purchasing power parity and perfect capital mobility make stabilization just a question of the appropriate exchange rate policy and the proper rate of domestic credit creation the traditional view is substantially right as a long run model but it fails in the dynamics the monetarist model is as we know now fundamentally wrong as a short run description of the possibilities of inflation control there is need and room for a paradigm that places emphasis on the debt money mix in financing the budget on the stickiness of inflation rates and on the place of short run real exchange rate and real interest rate variations that these are key features of the transition phase is amply borne out by the devasting and unsuccessful experiences with monetarist stabilization in argentina chile and brazil

multi firm regulation without lump sum taxes abstract this paper considers a problem of multi firm regulation where the regulator cannot make monetary transfers to or from firms otherwise the set up is standard two firms charging two part tariffs sell in separate markets and marginal costs are private information without transfers the regulator faces an additional consumer participation constraint that the representative consumer must wish to participate in the market in all states the paper studies the second best optimal regulatory scheme that respects this constraint and shows that it has some surprising properties i the regulator may wish to drive informational rents down to zero even at the cost of some price distortion ii consumer surplus may be zero in some states and iii the price that one firm charges is decreasing in the other s cost

asymmetric information incentives and intrafirm resource allocation this paper considers the question how should a firm allocate a resource among divisions when the productivity of the resource in each division is known only to the division manager obviously if the divisions as represented by their managers are indifferent among various allocations of the resource the headquarters can simply request the division managers to reveal their private information on productivity knowing that the managers have no incentive to lie the resource allocation problem can then be solved under complete or at least symmetric information this aspect is a flaw in much of the recent literature on this topic i e there is nothing in the models considered which makes divisions prefer one allocation over another thus although in some cases elaborate allocation schemes are proposed and analyzed they are really unnecessary in the model we develop a division can produce the same output with less managerial effort if it is allocated more resources and effort is costly to the manager we further assume that this effort is unobservable by the headquarters so that it cannot infer divisional productivity from data on divisional output and managerial effort given these assumptions we seek an optimal resource allocation process our results show that certain types of transfer pricing schemes are optimal in particular if there are no potentially binding capacity constraints on production of the resource then an optimal process is for each division to choose a transfer price from a schedule announced by the headquarters division managers receive a fixed compensation minus the cost of the resource allocated to them at the chosen transfer price resources are allocated on the basis of the chosen transfer prices if there is a potentially binding constraint on resource production a somewhat more complicated but similar scheme is required

reforms and macroeconomic adjustments in chile during 1974 1984 abstract this paper provides a background on the main macroeconomic developments of the reform period after a review of the macroeconomic disequilibrium before the reforms the paper interprets the macroadjustments the interpretation covers two distinct periods 1973 1976 when policy was based on a closed economy view and 1977 1982 when macropolicy was increasingly guided by an open economy model the paper argues that the setback that chile suffered during 1982 1983 and the large external debt that was accumulated were the result of two major errors the first was the use of the exchange rate to stabilize prices without due regard for the incentives for large capital inflows that arose from this policy at a time when international capital markets were very liquid the second major error was in the second half of 1981 after a large drop in capital inflows the authorities relied on an automatic adjustment mechanism by which the monetary squeeze from the reduction in capital inflows would improve the real exchange rate because wages were indexed to prior inflation the adjustment mechanism was bound to create substantial unemployment as indeed was the case the paper concludes with the assessment that most of the micro reforms were in the right direction and had the expected result and the errors were mostly in the design of macroeconomic policies

credibility disinflation and gradualism abstract the following conundrum is examined success or failure of a disinflation policy depends largely on expectations of maintained lower money growth this suggests two equilibria a a policy is expected to be maintained and succeeds policy makers are re elected maintaining the policy and validating initial expectations b a policy is not expected to be maintained and fails policy makers are not re elected the policy is not maintained validating initial expectations

production externalities and two way distortion in principal multi agent problems this paper studies an otherwise standard principal agent problem with hidden information but where there are positive production externalities between agents the output of any agent depends positively on the effort expended by other agents it is shown that the optimal contract for the principal exhibits two way distortion the effort of any agent is oversupplied relative to the first best when his marginal cost of effort is low and undersupplied taken his marginal cost of effort is high this pattern of distortion cannot otherwise arise in optimal single or multi agent incentive contracts unless there are countervailing incentives however unlike the countervailing incentives case the pattern of distortion we find is robust to the precise form of the externality journal of economic literature classification numbers d21 d28 c 2000 academic press

optimal incentive contracts with multiple agents abstract a setting in which a single principal contracts with two agents who possess perfect private information about their own productivity is considered with correlated productivities each agent s private information also provides a signal about the other agent s productivity in contrast to the setting in which there is only one agent it is shown that such private information may be of no value to the agents it is only if the agents are risk averse that their private information may allow them to command rents moreover when the agents are constrained only to reveal their private information truthfully as a nash equilibrium the pareto optimal incentive scheme may induce the agents to adopt strategies other than truth telling this leads to the consideration of truth telling equilibria that are not pareto dominated in the subgame played by the agents among all such equilibria the one preferred by the principal restricts one agent to tell the truth as a dominant strategy and the other as a nash response to truth

regulation competition and liberalization in many countries throughout the world regulators are struggling to determine whether and how to introduce competition into regulated industries this essay examines the complexities involved in the liberalization process while stressing the importance of case specific analyses this essay distinguishes liberalization policies that generally are procompetitive from corresponding anticompetitive liberalization policies

implementing coordinated team play abstract this note studies a moral hazard model of joint production in which there are strong gains to coordination the mechanism we propose for resolving the tacit collusion problem that arises in our setting makes use of at will contracts which provide the agents with the option to quit at any time journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 d82

promoting fair competition in public procurement abstract if a government cares for local firms profit but not for foreign firms foreign firms will be discriminated against when competing for government procurement contracts foreign firms will be chosen less often and when chosen earn less profit than local firms we analyze a more central authority s policies against such discrimination given a situation in which a government has private information on product quality and the competing firms have private information on own costs necessary and sufficient conditions for free revelation of quality information are derived finally optimal policy when these conditions are not satisfied is characterized and discussed

comarketing alliances should you contract on actions or outcomes comarketing alliances often involve multiple partners and a given partner s marketing efforts on behalf of the alliance can indirectly affect the demand of the other partners individual partners however can ignore the effects of such an externality and invest suboptimally to the detriment of the alliance this paper examines the relative effectiveness of outcome and action based contracts in providing the alliance partners with the incentives to invest appropriately we develop a mathematical model in which a focal firm e g sony contracts with two partners e g mcdonald s and old navy when each of these partners is privately informed about the impact of the alliance on its demand our analysis evaluates the strengths and weaknesses of outcome or output and action based or input based contracts in settings with varying levels of the demand externality we find that when there is either no externality or a relatively weak positive externality there is a strict preference for output based contracts that preference however is reversed with a sufficiently strong positive externality this paper explains the underlying rationale for these findings this paper was accepted by preyas desai marketing

extraction of surplus under adverse selection the case of insurance markets abstract we consider a principal agent setting with two types of risk averse agents with different abilities to avoid losses abilities types are characterized by two distributions f and g which are agents private information all agents have the same increasing and strictly concave utility function u under which g has a higher certainty equivalent in this environment we derive a characterization of pairs of distributions under which a first best outcome can be achieved or approximated we prove that a first best outcome can be achieved if and only if the distribution f is not absolutely continuous with respect to the distribution g if this condition is not satisfied the first best outcome can be approximated arbitrarily close if and only if the likelihood ratio df dg is unbounded journal of economic literature classification number d82

correlation and relative performance evaluation this paper reexamines the issue of relative versus joint incentive schemes in a multi agent moral hazard framework the model allows a full analysis of the information and dependence structure an important result is that the widespread notion that greater correlation in outcomes calls for more competition is not robust first when the dependence structure is effort sensitive the optimal incentive scheme in general mixes elements of relative evaluation and joint evaluation second under limited liability higher equilibrium correlation tends to make joint performance evaluation more desirable examples are provided regarding incentives in firms finance and innovation

using trembling hand perfection to alleviate the interlinked principal agent problem for a simple interlinked principal agent problem equilibrium may b e inefficient to the principals when each agent s discrete effort and a common random variable observable to agents but not principals jointly determine the principals payoffs in a moral hazard problem agents may tend to shirk however slight uncertainty about the rationality of other agents strategies can reduce incentives to shirk in particular the trembling hand perfect refinement of nash equilibria can result in more effort and higher payoffs to the principal unfortunately these efficiency gains diminish as additional intermed diate effort levels are added to the model copyright 1988 by the editors of the scandinavian journal of economics

external shocks financial reforms and stabilization attempts in uruguay during 1974 1983 abstract this paper interprets and evaluates uruguay s reforms emphasizing the outcome of financial reforms and attempts to bring down inflation it is shown that domestic interest rate deregulation and the removal of prohibition towards holding dollar denominated assets led to a rise in the ratio of financial assets in gdp and to a shift towards dollar denominated assets causes of the persistent and large spread between peso and dollar interest rates adjusted for the preannounced rate of devaluation tablita are examined the discussion of the stabilization program during 1979 1982 and its aftermath in 1983 shows that setting the tablita at less than the difference between internal and external inflation led to severe imbalances because of remaining redundant protection and price stickness the real exchange rate appreciated sharply for a prolonged period and the trade balance widened until the stabilization episode ended with capital flight when doubts set in about the sustainability of the tablita

collusion proof yardstick competition abstract this paper analyses the incentives for collusion among firms when an industry is regulated by means of yardstick competition the central assumption is that firms must write collusive side contracts before the revelation of private correlated information and are unable to communicate later the analysis shows that collusion is costly to society only if firms can commit to side payments third best collusion proof yardstick competition entails more less distortion of efficiency for low productivity high productivity firms than second best yardstick competition the benefit of yardstick competition vanishes in the limit as correlation of private information becomes near perfect

obstacles to disinflation what is the role of fiscal expectations persistently high expected inflation often makes it difficult for policy makers to recover from inflationary episodes without substantial output losses using survey data from eleven disinflation episodes we can assess whether the more or less sluggish decline of inflation rates towards lower target levels is related to backward looking pricing behavior or to imperfect credibility of the stabilization efforts we find that expectations of future inflation play a much more important role than past inflation in shaping the inflation process second we find that an improvement in various measures of fiscal balances significantly reduces inflation expectations this evidence suggests that when attempting to stabilize inflation priority should be given to building fiscal credibility oya celasun r gaston gelos and alessandro prati

cooperation in the budgeting process in this article i analyze the role of cooperation between firm divisions in the budgeting process i study a setting in which cooperation is a necessary condition for information sharing among division managers which in turn benefits the principal the results in this article can help reconcile the differing views between practitioners and academic researchers on the desirability of cooperation in the budgeting process the results also have implications for some common budgeting processes observed in practice including bundling budgeting and bottom up budgeting

dominant strategy implementation of bayesian incentive compatible allocation rules abstract a large literature on incentive mechanisms represents incentive constraints by the requirement that truthful reporting be a bayesian equilibrium this paper identifies mechanism design problems for which there is no loss in replacing bayesian incentive compatibility by the stronger requirement of dominant strategies we identify contexts where it is possible to change the transfer payments of an optimal bayesian mechanism so as to create dominant strategies and yet leave every participant s expected utility unchanged we also address the issue of multiple equilibria and unique implementation contexts where these results apply include auctions bilateral bargaining procurement contracting and intrafirm resource allocation

parallelism in information production moral hazard and relative performance evaluations we analyse how to design incentive schemes for agents producing information the agents may for example be divisional managers market researchers or consultants financial analysts corporate auditors research scientists or political pollsters we show that an agent should be compensated more for making a correct rather than an incorrect prediction and for agreeing rather than disagreeing with colleagues depending on the environment correctness should be compensated more or less than agreement also compensation should increase with the difficulties of making correct or conforming predictions one consequence of the result is that it may sometimes reduce a principal s total incentive costs to engage with more information producers performing parallel investigations because the possibility to make relative performance evaluations of the agents may substantially reduce the costs of motivating the agents in performing their duties as desired

equity and adverse selection with correlated costs abstract we show that agent concern with inequity is not constraining for a principal when the binary costs of two risk neutral agents are correlated

information constrained insurance the revelation principle extended abstract private information induced incentive constraints can cause allocations to diverge from full information optimal allocations often in the direction of limited insurance but can bring unanticipated anomalies related plausible contract exclusion restrictions can be damaging in welfare terms more generally private information optimal allocations can be sensitive to the information structure suggesting that the latter be specified with an eye toward realism as well as tractability in an effort to make tractability less of a constraint the paper shows how two apparently difficult information structures a costly state verification environment and a multiperiod multilateral private information environment can be handled theoretically by revelation principle methods the paper also shows how solutions can be generated numerically

a note on the optimal structure of production abstract we analyze the advantages of centralization and decentralization in industries in which production takes place in several stages and the costs are privately observed by the agents in charge of production we demonstrate that informational diseconomies arise when uncorrelated information is concentrated in the hands of a single agent these diseconomies arise when the stages of production are different activities with different cost supports journal of economic literature classification numbers d82 l22 l51

moral hazard and renegotiation in multi agent incentive contracts when each agent makes a renegotiation offer abstract the purpose of this paper is to explore a mechanism for implementing the desired equilibrium actions in the one principal multi agent model with renegotiation when each agent is allowed to make a renegotiation offer with some belief restriction we show that there exists a mechanism in which the second best strategy is always implemented

an analysis of the principal agent problem most analyses of the principal agent problem assume that the principal chooses an incentive scheme to maximize expected utility subject to the agent s utility being at a stationary point an important paper of mirrlees has shown that this approach is generally invalid we present an alternative procedure if the agent s preferences over income lotteries are independent of action we show that the optimal way of implementing an action by the agent can be found by solving a convex programming problem we use this to characterize the optimal incentive scheme and to analyze the determinants of the seriousness of an incentive problem

regulating a monopolist with unknown costs we consider the problem of how to regulate a monopolistic firm whose costs are unknown to the regulator the regulator s objective is to maximize a linear social welfare function of the consumers surplus and the firm s profit in the optimal regulatory policy prices and subsidies are designed as functions of the firm s cost report so that expected social welfare is maximized subject to the constraints that the firm has nonnegative profit and has no incentive to misrepresent its costs we explicitly derive the optimal policy and analyze its properties in their classic papers dupuit 2 and hotelling 5 considered pricing policies for a bridge that had a fixed cost of construction and zero marginal cost they demonstrated that the pricing policy that maximizes consumer well being is to set price equal to marginal cost and to provide a subsidy to the supplier equal to the fixed cost so that a firm would be willing to provide the bridge this first best solution is based on a number of informational assumptions first the demand function is assumed to be known to both the regulator and to the firm while the assumption of complete information may be too strong the assumption that information about demand is as available to the regulator as it is to the firm does not seem unnatural a second informational assumption is that the regulator has complete information about the cost of the firm or at least has the same information about cost as does the firm this assumption is unlikely to be met in reality since the firm would be expected to have better information about costs than would the regulator as weitzman has stated an essential feature of the regulatory environment i am trying to describe is uncertainty about the exact specification of each firm s cost function in most cases even the managers and engineers most closely associated with production will be unable to precisely specify beforehand the cheapest way to generate various hypothetical output levels because they are yet removed from the production process the regulators are likely to be vaguer still about a firm s cost function 12 p 684 as this observation suggests it is natural to expect that a firm would have better information regarding its costs than would a regulator the purpose of this paper is to develop an optimal regulatory policy for the case in which the regulator does not know the costs of the firm one strategy that a regulator could use in the absence of full information about costs is to give the firm the title to the total social surplus and to delegate the pricing decision to the firm in pursuing its own interests which would then be to maximize the total social surplus the firm would adopt the same marginal cost pricing strategy that the regulator would have imposed if the regulator had

hierarchical structure and responsibility accounting the literature on responsibility accounting offers two broad imperatives first a manager is best evaluated based on what he controls second responsibility follows a hierarchical arrangement the departmental manager is responsible for the controllable departmental activities the plant manager is responsible for the activities in the various departments within the plant the division manager is responsible for the aggregate activities of various plants and so on this literature embodies a variety of theories of behavior and organization examples include expectancy theory ronen and livingstone 1975 and brownell and mcinnes 1968 contingency theory bruns and waterhouse 1975 and merchant 1984 neoclassical economics gordon 1964 and principal agent modeling baiman 1982 principal agent modeling emphasizes information asymmetries in understanding responsibility accounting in particular the link between controllability and informativeness holmstrom 1979 1982 baiman and demski 1980 and antle and demski 1988 has been well explicated and the use of relative performance evaluation antle and smith 1986 demski and sappington 1984 and ma moore and turnbull 1988 has received significant attention 1 far less attention has been afforded the hierarchical aspect of responsibility accounting this is the focus of our analysis

capital rationing and organizational slack in capital budgeting this paper reconciles three stylized facts about capital budgeting in firms and shows that they are tied to the presence of asymmetric information among the several members of the firm each with his or her own objectives and decisions the facts of interest are 1 the existence of organizational slack 2 the rationing of resources within organizations 3 the stated cut off rate for accepting capital projects in firms is often greater than the market rate of interest organizational slack is defined as the excess of resources allocated over the minimum necessary to accomplish the tasks assigned resource rationing is defined as the under allocation of resources i e an increase in the amount allocated would generate revenues in excess of its costs rationing and slack are both manifestations of ex post inefficiencies an lp model is used to show that these inefficiencies can occur in ex ante efficient organizational designs when asymmetric information is present the optimal allocation policy involves a hurdle rate criterion in which the hurdle rate is strictly in excess of the cost of capital thus inducing rationing in some states of the world typically resources are optimally allocated such that slack exists in other states the optimal allocation policy trades off these two inefficiencies