Power fluctuations and political economy

We study (constrained) Pareto efficient allocations in a dynamic production economy where the group that holds political power decides the allocation of resources. For high discount factors, the economy converges to a first-best allocation where labor supply decisions are not distorted. For low discount factors, distortions do not disappear and fluctuate over time. Most importantly, the set of sustainable first-best allocations is larger when there is less persistence in the identity of the party in power (because this encourages political compromise). This result contradicts the common presumption that there will be fewer distortions when there is a “stable ruling group”.     

Moral Hazard and Renegotiation with Multiple Agents

We investigate the effects of contract renegotiation in multi-agentsituations where risk-averse agents negotiate a contract offer to theprincipal after the agents observe a common, unverifiable perfect signalabout their actions. We show that renegotiation with multiple agentsreduces the cost of implementing any implementable action profile downto the first-best level, even though the principal cannot observe theagents' actions. Moreover, it is sufficient for the principal to use a"simple" initial contract, in the sense that it consists of nomore than a single sharing scheme for each agent and the total payments tothe agents are the same regardless of the realised state. An importantimplication is that decentralization, in the sense of delegated negotiationand proposals from the agents, can be as effective as centralized schemesthat utilize revelation mechanisms in unrestricted ways.     

Public-Good Provision with Many Participants

For a nonexcludable public good with benefit and cost functions independent of the number of participants, this paper studies second-best allocations under Bayesian interim incentive compatibility and interim individual rationality. As the number of participants becomes large, second-best provision levels converge in distribution to first-best levels if the latter are bounded. Second-best provision levels become large in absolute terms but small relative to first-best levels if benefit and cost functions are isoelastic. In contrast, for an excludable public good, the ratio of second-best to first-best levels is bounded away from zero.     

Contract renegotiation and options in agency problems

This article discusses the ability of an agent and a principalto achieve the first-best outcome when the agent invests inan asset that has greater value if owned by the principal thanby the agent. When contracts can be renegotiated, a well-knowndanger is that the principal can hold up the agent, underminingthe agent's investment incentives. We begin by identifying acountervailing effect: Investment by the agent can increasehis value for the asset, thus improving his bargaining positionin renegotiation. We show that option contracts will achievethe first best whenever his threat-point effect dominates theholdup effect. Otherwise, achieving the first best is difficultand, in many cases, impossible.     

Menu theorems for bilateral contracting

This paper studies bilateral contracting where multiple principals negotiate contracts with multiple agents independently. It is shown that pure-strategy equilibrium allocations relative to any ad hoc set of feasible mechanisms are supported by pure-strategy perfect Bayesian equilibria relative to the set of menus. This paper also shows that all equilibrium allocations to any ad hoc set of feasible mechanisms are supported by correlated equilibria relative to the set of menus, where a state is a probability distribution function over payoff-relevant variables. Furthermore, all equilibrium allocations relative to the set of menus persist even if principals use more complex mechanisms.     

STRATEGIC BIDDING AND CONTRACT RENEGOTIATION

When firms bid in procurement auctions, they take into account the likelihood of future contract renegotiations. If they anticipate that certain input quantities will change ex post, they have an incentive to strategically skew their itemized bids, thereby increasing profits for themselves and costs for the procuring agency. We develop and estimate a structural model of strategic bidding using a data set of road construction projects in Vermont. We find that bidding strategies lead to increased markups for renegotiated items and reduced markups for nonrenegotiated items, results consistent with bid‐skewing.     

Regular Distributive Efficiency and the Distributive Liberal Social Contract

We consider abstract social systems of private property, made of n individuals endowed with nonpaternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact through exchanges on competitive markets and Pareto‐improving lump‐sum transfers. The transfers follow from a distributive liberal social contract defined as a redistribution of initial endowments such that the resulting market equilibrium allocation is both: (i) a distributive optimum (i.e., is Pareto‐efficient relative to individual interdependent preferences) and (ii) unanimously weakly preferred to the initial market equilibrium. We elicit minimal conditions for meaningful social contract redistribution in this setup, namely, the weighted sums of individual interdependent utility functions, built from arbitrary positive weights, have suitable properties of nonsatiation and inequality aversion; individuals have diverging views on redistribution, in some suitable sense, at (inclusive) distributive optima; and the initial market equilibrium is not a distributive optimum. We show that the relative interior of the set of social contract allocations is then a simply connected smooth manifold of dimension n ? 1. We also show that the distributive liberal social contract rules out transfer paradoxes in Arrow–Debreu social systems. We show, finally, that the liberal social contract yields a norm of collective action for the optimal provision of any pure public good.     

Exit options in incomplete contracts with asymmetric information

This paper analyzes bilateral contracting in an environment with contractual incompleteness and asymmetric information. One party (the seller) makes an unverifiable quality choice and the other party (the buyer) has private information about its valuation. A simple deterministic exit option contract, which allows the buyer to refuse trade, achieves the first-best in the benchmark cases where either quality is verifiable or the buyer?s valuation is public information. But, when unverifiable and asymmetric information are combined, deterministic contracts are necessarily inefficient. The first-best can be achieved, however, through simple message games with stochastic terms of trade as off-equilibrium outcomes.     

Ex ante contracting with endogenously determined communication plans

Summary. In this paper we introduce a new model of ex ante contracting for economies with asymmetric information to examine endogenously determined communication plans for information sharing in the interim stage. In contrast to the models used in previous research, in the present model agents negotiate not only on a contract of state contingent allocations but also on a communication plan, a set of rules describing how agents will reveal part of their private information at the interim stage to execute the trade contracts. We prove a result about the nested structure of the set of allocations implementable by various communication plans and establish the existence of core strategies for this cooperative game under various regularity conditions. Received: 4 March 1998; revised version: 17 September 1999     

The Effectiveness of Distributive Policy in a Competitive Economy

I consider an abstract social system made of individual owners endowed with nonpaternalistic interdependent preferences, who interact by means of individual gifts and by exchanges on competitive markets. The existence of equilibrium is established. I identify the set of allocations that are decentralizable in the sense that they are general equilibria for some vectors of market prices and initial endowments. This set is characterized in a simple way from the social endowment and individual market and distributive preferences. Decentralizable allocations are all accessible to distributive policy, unless public transfers are confined to some neighborhood of 0. In the latter case, distributive policy remains free to perform local redistributions of wealth across the components of the graph of equilibrium gifts.     

On the optimality of optimal income taxation

The Mirrleesian model of income taxation restricts attention to simple allocation mechanism with no strategic interdependence, i.e., the optimal labor supply of any one individual does not depend on the labor supply of others. It has been argued by Piketty (2009) [12] that this restriction is substantial because more sophisticated mechanisms can reach first-best allocations that are out of reach with simple mechanisms. In this paper, we assess the validity of Piketty?s critique in an independent private values model. As a main result, we show that the optimal sophisticated mechanism is a simple mechanism, or, equivalently, a Mirrleesian income tax system.     

Regulation of Public Utilities under Asymmetric Information

We consider the relationship between a localcommunity and a private operator in charge ofthe water utility. An important feature of themodel is the possibility of water networklosses that are costly to the operator. Wecompute the first-best and asymmetricinformation solutions to the optimal contract,with private information on the operator'stechnology. Based on an econometric estimationof production cost and water demand for a panelof French local communities, we simulate theoptimal contract solutions and show thatasymmetric information has importantconsequences for the regulation of water publicutilities.     

A utilitarian approach to the provision and pricing of excludable public goods

This paper studies utilitarian welfare maximization in a large economy with an excludable public good where individual preferences are private information. If inequality aversion is large, optimal allocations involve the use of admission fees and exclusion to redistribute resources from people who benefit a lot from the public good to people who benefit little. If inequality aversion is close to zero, optimal admission fees are zero. Because of inequality aversion, information rents of people who benefit a lot from the public good receive less weight, so optimal provision levels for the public good are below first-best levels.     

Moral hazard and legal services contracts

We examine legal services contracts characterized by a contingency fee and an hours reporting requirement in a moral hazard setting. We find that hours reporting requirements in contingency contracts can reduce the rent needed to induce high attorney effort under moral hazard. Under certain conditions, the ability to set hours above the first-best level leads a client to choose a contract inducing high effort when she otherwise would not. The important condition of this result is, however, that hours must be contractible. We apply our model to the 2010 Florida “sunshine” law that requires hours reporting by private attorneys employed on a contingency fee basis by the attorney general. We find the sunshine laws of Florida and other states may, in addition to providing more transparency in government contracting, increase the public benefit from an attorney general’s employment of private attorneys.     

Optimal monetary and fiscal policies in a search theoretic model of monetary exchange

Search models of monetary exchange commonly assume that terms of trade in anonymous markets are determined via Nash bargaining, which generally causes monetary equilibrium to be inefficient. Bargaining frictions add to the classical intertemporal distortion present in most monetary models, whereby agents work today to obtain cash that can be used only in future transactions. In this paper, we study the properties of optimal fiscal and monetary policy within the framework of Lagos and Wright (2005). We show that fiscal policy can be implemented to alleviate underproduction while money is still essential. If lump sum monetary transfers are available, a production subsidy can restore the efficiency of monetary equilibria. The Friedman rule belongs to the optimal policy set, but higher inflation rates are also possible. When lump-sum monetary transfers are not available, equilibrium allocations are generally not first-best. Nevertheless, fiscal policy still results in substantial welfare gains. Money can be extracted from circulation via a sales tax on decentralized market activities, and the Friedman rule is only optimal if the buyer has relatively low bargaining power.     

A simple impossibility result in behavioral contract theory

This paper studies a contract between an optimistic agent and a realistic principal, both risk-neutral. Even with complete contracts and ex-ante symmetric information, it may be impossible to achieve the first-best unless the weight on emotions is sufficiently low.     

On the value of partial commitment for cooperative investment in buyer–supplier relationship

Does formal contracting foster cooperation in a buyer–supplier relationship? In line with the literature, we find that a renegotiable contract with relationship-specific joint investments does not make it possible to reach the first-best. However, we show that a renegotiable contract may induce more cooperation than an informal arrangement can. This result may help to understand how cooperation emerges in Japanese procurement practices, which typically involve relationship-specific joint investments and renegotiable contracts.     

Time of the essence

In most industries, ranging from information systems development to construction, an overwhelming proportion of projects are delayed beyond estimated completion time. This fact constitutes somewhat of a puzzle for existing theory. The present paper studies project delays and optimal contracts under moral hazard in a setting with time to build. Within this setup, project delays are found to be most likely to happen at early stages of development and intimately connected to the degree of commitment of the procurer and the class of contracts that can be enforced. The first-best, optimal spot contracting and optimal long-term contract scenarios are analyzed, as well as commonly encountered additional constraints on the long-term contract.     

Regulation of non-marketed outputs and substitutable inputs

We study the regulation of a monopolistic firm that provides a non-marketed output based on multiple substitutable inputs. The regulator is able to observe the effectiveness of the provision, but faces information asymmetries with respect to the efficiency of the firm’s activities. Specifically, we consider a setting where one input and the output are observable, while another input and related costs are not. Multi-dimensional information asymmetries are introduced by discrete distributions for the functional form of the marginal rate of substitution between the inputs as well as for the input costs. For this novel setting, we investigate the theoretically optimal Bayesian regulation mechanism. We find that the first-best solution cannot be obtained in case of shadow costs of public funding. The second-best solution implies separation of the most efficient type with first-best input levels, and upwards distorted (potentially bunched) observable input levels for all other types. Moreover, we compare these results to a simpler non-Bayesian approach, i.e., a single pooling contract, and hence, bridge the gap between the academic discussion and regulatory practice. In a numerical simulation, we identify certain conditions in which a single contract non-Bayesian regulation can indeed get close to the second-best solution of the Bayesian menu of contracts regulation.     

Simple contracts, renegotiation under asymmetric information, and the hold-up problem

In this article it is demonstrated that voluntary bargaining over a collective decision under asymmetric information may well lead to ex post efficiency if the default decision is non-trivial. It is argued that the default decision may be interpreted as a ‘simple’ contract that the parties have written ex ante. This result is used in order to show that simple unconditional contracts which are renegotiated may allow the hold-up problem to be solved, even if the parties’ valuations are private information.