Sorting versus screening: Search frictions and competing mechanisms

In a market where sellers compete by posting trading mechanisms, we allow for a general search technology and show that its features crucially affect the equilibrium mechanism. Price posting prevails when meetings are rival, i.e., when a meeting by one buyer reduces another buyer's meeting probability. Under price posting buyers reveal their type by sorting ex-ante. Only if the meeting technology is sufficiently non-rival, price posting is not an equilibrium. Multiple buyer types then visit the same sellers who screen ex-post through auctions.     

Optimal voting schemes with costly information acquisition

A group of individuals with identical preferences must make a decision under uncertainty about which decision is best. Before the decision is made, each agent can privately acquire a costly and imperfect signal. We discuss how to design a mechanism for eliciting and aggregating the collected information so as to maximize ex-ante social welfare.We first show that, of all mechanisms, a sequential one is optimal and works as follows. At random, one agent at a time is selected to acquire information and report the resulting signal. Agents are informed of neither their position in the sequence nor of other reports. Acquiring information when called upon and reporting truthfully is an equilibrium.We next characterize the ex-ante optimal scheme among all ex-post efficient mechanisms. In this mechanism, a decision is made when the precision of the posterior exceeds a cut-off that decreases with each additional report. The restriction to ex-post efficiency is shown to be without loss when the available signals are sufficiently imprecise. On the other hand, ex-post efficient mechanisms are shown to be suboptimal when the cost of information acquisition is sufficiently small.     

外部选择与关系专用性投资激励——基于GHM模型的研究

现实中的契约总是不完全的,当自然状态被参与人观察到之后,为了保证交易有效率,通常会对事前契约进行再谈判.首先,论文研究了事后再谈判时参与人的外部选择对事后合作租金的分配影响及事前关系专用性投资激励问题;其次,根据外部选择是否具有约束力,将外部选择区分为威胁点和现状点.研究结果显示:当外部选择为现状点时,不完全契约会导致事前关系专用性投资不足;而如果事后外部选择为威胁点时,投资方会作出有效率投资或投资过度     

Price and information disclosure in the private art market: A signalling game

In this paper, we model private art market agents’ strategic interactions in presence of two types of asymmetric information, about artwork quality and buyer’s knowledge, assuming the seller does not know how informed is the buyer while the buyer does not know the quality of the artwork before purchase. If the seller can choose either a high or a low price and the buyer can signal his type to the seller, we identify the conditions for both equilibria with pooling buyer signalling strategy and with separating strategy, as well as conditions for equilibria where the seller fixes the price according to the actual quality and where he posts prices trying to take advantage of buyer’s limited information. Finally, we identify the condition for the emergence of a “counter-lemon” result, where low-quality artworks and uninformed collectors exit the market, suggesting that seller uncertainty does not directly benefit the buyers, but it can impact the quality traded in the market.     

Why stare decisis?

All Courts rule ex-post, after most economic decisions are sunk. This can generate a time-inconsistency problem. From an ex-ante perspective, Courts will have the ex-post temptation to be excessively lenient. This observation is at the root of the rule of precedent, known as stare decisis.Stare decisis forces Courts to weigh the benefits of leniency towards the current parties against the beneficial effects that tougher decisions have on future ones.We study these dynamics and find that stare decisis guarantees that precedents evolve towards ex-ante efficient decisions, thus alleviating the Courts' time-inconsistency problem. However, the dynamics do not converge to full efficiency.     

学习能力影响下供应链企业间知识交易的最优合约配置!

在知识买方——供应链中的供应商的学习能力为其私人信息的情况下,知识卖方——制造商通过设计将知识交易量与原材料产品折扣价格相结合的合约菜单来甄别供应商的学习能力类型。在此基础上,建立信息不对称情形下的知识交易模型,通过模型求解得出最优的合约配置,并结合信息对称情形下的基准情形对合约菜单的相关性质进行了分析。最后利用数值算例对上述相关性质进行了说明。     

Rules of evidence and liability in contract litigation: The efficiency of the General Dynamics rule

We examine rules of evidence and liability in contract litigation. When a contractor fails to perform, it has a legal defense that the buyer withheld private information relevant to the performance of the contract. Suppose the buyer claims that admitting evidence for the defense would compromise a valuable secret, for example, a state secret, what should the legal rule be? We show that the evidentiary rules introduced by the Supreme Court in General Dynamics v. U.S. lead to a more efficient outcome than either a strict liability rule or an evidentiary rule requiring the disclosure of the buyer's private information.     

Welfare analysis of a market with pairwise meetings and asymmetric information

Summary We study the welfare properties of a market with pairwise meetings and asymmetric information, establishing an equivalence between asymptotically expost individually rational and asymptotically (ex-ante, interim and ex-post) efficient equilibrium sequences.We thank Andreu Mas-Colell, Eric Maskin, and Thomas Sjöström for having raised the question which led to the writing of this paper. We are grateful to Nicholas Yannelis and two anonymous referees for helpful comments.     

Dynamic price competition

We consider the model of price competition for a single buyer among many sellers in a dynamic environment. The surplus from each trade is allowed to depend on the path of previous purchases, and as a result, the model captures phenomena such as learning by doing and habit formation in consumption.We characterize Markovian equilibria for finite and infinite horizon versions of the model and show that the stationary infinite horizon version of the model possesses an efficient equilibrium where all the sellers receive an equilibrium payoff equal to their marginal contribution to the social welfare.     

The contracting value of tainted reports in cost reduction settings

While cost accounting is a well-developed discipline with a rich institutional past, it is criticized for being manipulable. This criticism is due, in part, to the existence of multiple, yet equally accepted cost allocation procedures or cost estimation techniques. Employing a principal-agent model, cost accounting is modeled as a menu of alternative methods which, conditional on agent effort, produce noisy, unbiased and independently distributed (i.e., equally defensible) measures from which a single realization is selected ex post as the report used to contract with the agent. Assuming that the report does not indicate which method produced it, the report modeled is “tainted” in that the lowest (most favorable to the agent) outcome is reported, where the “amount” of tainting corresponds to the menu's size. The paper identifies bright-line conditions where the principal's expected net payoff is independent of the amount of tainting, demonstrating that tainting does not necessarily affect the report's incentive value.     

The Dynamic Vickrey Auction

We study the efficient allocation of a single object over a finite time horizon. Buyers arrive randomly over time, are long-lived, and have independent private values. The valuation of a buyer may depend on the time of the allocation in an arbitrary way. We construct an incentive compatible mechanism in which (A) there is a single financial transaction (with the buyer), (B) ex-post participation constraints are fulfilled, (C) there is no positive transfer to any agent and (D) payments are determined online. We exploit that under the efficient allocation rule, there is a unique potential winning period for each buyer. This reduces the multidimensional type to one dimension and the payment of the winner can be defined as the lowest valuation for the potential winning period, with which the buyer would have won the object. In a static model, this payment rule coincides with the payment rule of the Vickrey Auction.     

Termination clauses in partnerships

We show that when designing a partnership agreement partner firms may prefer not to specify how to allocate the commonly owned assets should there be an early termination of the contract. By not including such a clause, firms induce litigation before a Court with positive probability. Firms create this ex-post inefficiency in order to increase the levels of non-contractible investments, i.e. increase the ex-ante efficiency. The absence of an asset allocation clause works as a “discipline device” that mitigates the hold-up problem within the partnership. In our set-up, no other contract but that without an asset allocation clause can credibly create an ex-post inefficiency.     

Monetary Integration and Economic Reform

Recent research in contract theory views ownership as a substitute for complete contracts. Here, this approach is applied to monetary integration. Countries face a coordination problem conducting monetary policy. Negative spillovers ensure uncoordinated policy generates too high inflation. Ex ante , policy makers can undertake politically costly economic reform. This has a positive spillover because it improves the outcome of the monetary policy game. Ex-post contracting over policy may be possible, but it supposed that ex-ante contracting over reform and monetary policy is not. This paper analyses when monetary union is a good substitute for this inability to commit.     

Costly enforcement of property rights and the Coase theorem

We examine a setting in which property rights are initially ambiguously defined. Whether the parties go to court to remove the ambiguity or bargain and settle before or after trial, they incur enforcement costs. When the parties bargain, a version of the Coase theorem holds. However, despite the additional costs of going to court, other ex-post inefficiencies, and the absence of incomplete information, going to court may ex-ante Pareto dominate settling out of court. This is especially true in dynamic settings, where obtaining a court decision today saves on future enforcement costs. When the parties do not negotiate and go to court, a simple rule for the initial ambiguous assignment of property rights maximizes net surplus. A paper circulated under the same title and dated 6 March 2000 contained the basic structure examined in this paper, but did not develop many of the results reported here. For comments, we would like to thank participants at the WZB-CEPR contests conference and seminar audiences at the University of Southern California, the University of British Columbia, UC Davis, and UC Riverside.     

Adverse selection,commitment and exhaustible resource taxation

This paper studies the contractual relationship between a government and a firm in charge of the extraction of an exhaustible resource. Governments design taxation scheme to capture resource rent and they usually propose contracts with limited duration and possess less information on resources than the extractive firms do. This article investigates how information asymmetry on costs and an inability to commit to long-term contracts affect tax revenue and the extraction path. This study gives several unconventional results. First, when information asymmetry exists, the inability to commit does not necessarily lower tax revenues. Second, under asymmetric information without commitment, an efficient firm may produce during the first period more or less than under symmetric information. Hence, the inability to commit has an ambiguous effect on the exhaustion date. Third, the modified Hotelling's rule is such that an increase in the discount factor does not necessarily reduce the first-period extraction.     

Inefficient ex-post equilibria in efficient auctions

Summary. I consider a single-object English auction with two asymmetric bidders and show that it has a continuum of inefficient undominated ex-post equilibria. The result extends for the generalized VCG mechanism, Dasgupta-Maskin auction and, generally, for every auction that has an efficient ex-post equilibrium. Received: November 5, 2001; revised version: June 10, 2002 RID="*" ID="*"I am grateful to Vijay Krishna, Sergei Izmalkov and anonymous referee for many important comments.     

Option contracting in the California water market

Temporary water transfers, as achievable under option contracts, capture gains from trade that would go unrealized if only permanent transfers of water rights were possible. This paper develops a bilateral option contracting model for water which includes the possibility of conveyance losses and random delivery. Seller-optimal and socially optimal option contracts are characterized in terms of relevant base and strike prices, as well as contract volumes, from an ex-ante and an ex-post point of view. Lastly, welfare gains are estimated, and actual contract prices in California are compared to model-predicted prices.     

Fiscal policy rules,budget deficits,and forecasting biases

In this paper, we analyze the impact fiscal policy rules have on budget deficits and forecasting biases in official budget outlooks. Persistent budget deficits and over-optimistic budget forecasts have been observed in many countries in the past, especially in the euro area. To prevent such developments from happening in the future, fiscal rules have been revised or implemented with the aim to strengthen both preventive (ex-ante) and corrective (ex-post) elements of fiscal rules frameworks. Do such ex-ante and ex-post rules differ in their effects? In an attempt to answer this question, we build a two-period model and distinguish between ex-ante rules that apply to budget forecasts and ex-post rules that apply to realized budget deficits. Our model indicates that effectively enforced ex-post rules are more effective than ex-ante rules at reducing budget deficits. Interestingly, ex-ante rules differ from ex-post rules in their effects on forecasting biases. Only ex-post sanctions reduce forecasting biases, while ex-ante rules have no impact on such biases. In addition, we show that political stability and the size of government increase the effectiveness of fiscal rules. If, however, financial markets have a disciplining effect on governments, the effectiveness of fiscal rules is reduced. Our results imply that if fiscal policy rules cannot be effectively enforced, reforming other areas such as electoral rules or financial market regulations might be a more promising approach to ensuring sound public finances than fiscal policy rules.     

INVESTMENT IN HOSPITAL CARE TECHNOLOGY UNDER DIFFERENT PURCHASING RULES: A REAL OPTION APPROACH

Quality of health care is the product of several factors as the literature has long recognized. In this paper we focus on the relationship between quality and investment in health technology by analysing the optimal investment decision in a new health care technology of a representative hospital that maximizes its surplus in an uncertain environment. The new technology allows the hospital to increase the quality level of the care provided, but the investment is irreversible. The paper uses the framework of the real option literature to show how the purchaser might influence the quality level by setting a quality‐contingent long‐term contract with the hospital.The investment in new technology is in fact best incentivated within a long‐term contract where the number of treatments reimbursed depends on the level of investment made when the technology is new. In this way, asymmetry of information does not affect the outcome of the contract. In our model in fact the purchaser can verify the level of the investment only at the end of each period but the purchasing rule has an anticipating effect on the decision to invest.     

Minimax regret with imperfect ex-post knowledge of the state

We consider decision problems under complete ignorance and extend the minimax regret principle to situations where, after taking an action, the decision maker does not necessarily learn the state of the world. For example, if the decision maker only learns what the outcome is, then all she knows is that the actual state is one of the (possibly several) states that yield the observed outcome under the chosen action. We refer to this situation as imperfect ex-post information. We show that, given a choice between more information and less information, the decision maker prefers the latter. We also extend the framework to encompass the possibility of less than the extreme degree of pessimism that characterizes the minimax regret criterion.