Limited observability as a constraint in contract design

Limited observability is the assumption that economic agents can only observe a finite amount of information. Given this constraint, contracts among agents are necessarily finite and incomplete in comparison to the ideal complete contract that we model as infinite in detail. We consider the extent that finite contracts can approximate a complete contract. The objectives of the paper are: (i) to identify properties of agents’ preferences that determine whether or not finiteness of contracts causes significant inefficiency; (ii) to evaluate the performance of finite contracts against the ideal optimal contract in a bilateral bargaining model.     

Credible delegation

We show that the vertical delegation of decision-making authority to agent firms can act as a credible strategic commitment even when contracts are unobservable (or renegotiable) if and only if multilateral delegation is combined with decentralized ownership of the agent firms. In this case, the possibility of renegotiation of other agents’ contracts constrains the set of contracts acceptable to each agent. Delegation may induce more or less aggressive behavior, depending on the nature of within-structure competition among the agent firms. Thus, delegation may be a valuable, credible strategic commitment mechanism when strategies are either substitutes or complements.     

Negotiation and take it or leave it in common agency

This paper contrasts models of common agency in which principals compete in incentive contracts (that is, they make take it or leave it offers) with models where principals offer agents menus of incentive contracts from which the final contract is negotiated. It is shown that pure strategy equilibria in incentive contracts are robust to the possibility that principals might offer menus. In addition, a no-externalities condition is given such that any pure strategy equilibrium allocation with menus can be supported with competition in incentive contracts. The no-externalities condition is restrictive, but it is shown that it applies in most well-known common agency problems, including, for example, the Bertrand pricing problem.     

Additionality When REDD Contracts Must be Self-Enforcing

This paper examines self-enforcing contracts as a financial mechanism for reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation when the opportunity cost of the land (i.e., landholder type) is private information and is imperfectly correlated over time (i.e., partially persistent types). Because self-enforcement limits the feasible incentives, the conservation levels are constrained by the surplus created. Regardless of the degree of persistence of such opportunity costs across contracting periods, a first-best self-enforcing contract can deliver “additional” carbon sequestration beyond the business as usual scenario only if the value of forest conservation is sufficiently high. Otherwise, self-enforcing contracts can induce some, suboptimal level of carbon sequestration. The degree of persistence of opportunity costs across periods does not affect the amount of total payments provided in the optimal menu of contracts, but greater persistence of opportunity cost types leads to contracts that feature more of the total payment as a bonus in contracts for landholders with a high opportunity cost for their land and more of the total payment as an upfront fixed payment for landholders with a low opportunity cost.     

The Nash-threats folk theorem with communication and approximate common knowledge in two player games

We show that the use of communications to coordinate equilibria generates a Nash-threats folk theorem in two-player games with “almost public” information. The results generalize to the n-person case. However, the two-person case is more difficult because it is not possible to sustain equilibria by comparing the reports of different players, and using these “third parties” to effectively enforce contracts.     

Group insurance and lending with endogenous social collateral

We construct a dynamic model of self-enforcing insurance provision and lending to a community of borrowers who are connected by risk-sharing arrangements that are themselves subject to enforcement problems, as in Kocherlakota (1996). We show that an outside lender offering constant-consumption contracts can earn a higher profit if he conditions his repeated interactions with each borrower on the history of his interactions with all the group members (a joint liability contract), rather than on his history with that borrower only (individual liability contracts). This result holds even in the absence of informational asymmetries. The observation driving it is that with individual liability contracts, a joint welfare-maximizing group may prefer to have one or more group members default on their contracts, so that the group can consume a mix of outside funds and the defaulters' stochastic income. One contribution of our work is to give precise economic content to the concept of “social collateral” as the per-agent surplus from group risk-sharing over autarky. The group can deter its members from defaulting on their contracts with the principal by threatening to reduce that surplus.     

Piece rates, time rates, and teams: Explaining patterns in the employment relation

This paper illustrates how the economics of internal organization can be used to explain patterns in agricultural labor contracts. Piece rates tend to be chosen over time rates for tasks when shirking is easy monitor by ex post inspection. The incidence of piece rates is also higher where the work force is more heterogeneous, where high opportunity wages prevail and where some agricultural operations are done by specialized teams. These relationships are implied by the proposition that contracts minimize excess burden in the face of enforcement and information costs.     

Trading with a common agent under complete information: A characterization of Nash equilibria

We analyze an abstract model of trading where N principals submit quantity-payment schedules that describe the contracts they offer to an agent, and the agent then chooses how much to trade with every principal. This represents a special class of common agency games with complete information. We study all the subgame perfect Nash equilibria of these games, not only truthful ones, providing a complete characterization of equilibrium payoffs. In particular, we show that the equilibrium that is Pareto-dominant for the principals is not truthful when there are more than two of them. We also provide a partial characterization of equilibrium strategies.     

Weakening political connections by means of regulatory reform: Evidence from contracting out water services in Spain

One area of public policy where rent-seeking and favoritism is relatively common is the contracting out of public services. Private firms can improve their chances of obtaining contracts by bribing politicians or public servants and funding political parties. In the same vein, firms can gain access to policymakers by hiring influential former politicians—a practice commonly referred to as revolving-doors. In this paper, we use information from 922 privatizations of water services in Spanish municipalities between 1984 and 2016 and multinomial logistic regression techniques to study the association between specific firms securing contracts and the political parties ruling the municipalities. We find robust statistical evidence of an association between the Popular Party (Partido Popular or PP) and the firm Aqualia, part of the large Spanish holding company Fomento de Construcciones y Contratas (FCC), which is known to have funded the Popular Party. Furthermore, former PP politicians have been appointed to top positions in the FCC Board of Directors. However, this relationship weakened after the institutional reform of 2007 on public procurement and financing of political parties, which is empirically evaluated in this paper.     

On Bargaining for an Indivisible Good

This note studies contracts involving lotteries for the purpose of trading an indivisible good. Lottery contracts allow players to reach agreements for trading the good even if the reservation price of the potential buyer is below that of the potential seller. When certainty exchanges are possible, lottery contracts often dominate them. An interesting feature of the contracts is that the probability of trading the good depends on the players' bargaining powers, but the payments do not.Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C78.     

Introduction to the share economy

This paper introduces the major ideas in Martin Weitzman's The Share Economy. It notes that a “share” economy is one in which the marginal cost of labor is less than the average cost of labor; moreover, this condition can be induced by sharing revenues or profits. According to share theory, such contracts will lead firms to create more vacancies and thereby lower the average unemployment rate. Weitzman proposes to induce more share arrangements by giving a tax preference to share-type income.     

Macroeconomic Impacts of Carbon Capture and Storage in China

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a key technology for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. But a CCS facility consumes vast amounts of energy and capital. With this in mind we analyze macroeconomic consequences of a large scale introduction of CCS in China. We modify and extend the DRC-CGE, a macroeconomic CGE model of the country that is used for long-term planning and policy analyses. We analyze an internal finance scenario of domestic funding, and an external finance scenario of international funding. In the external finance scenario CCS is installed on 70 % of all power plants by 2050. This increases demand for coal in 2050 by one fifth and import of coal by one fourth. The strain on coal resources may be an important political concern for China. In the internal finance scenario coal resources are not strained since this scenario introduces a price on carbon that lifts prices of energy. Moreover, the price on carbon cuts across the board and the internal finance scenario is much more effective at reducing \(\hbox {CO}_{2}\) . On the other hand, in this scenario GDP goes down about 4 %, which also raises political concern.     

On derivatives and information costs

Information plays a central role in capital markets and in the process of asset pricing. The specific features of over-the-counter (OTC) markets require often an investment in information acquisition. Information costs can be defined in the context of Merton's [Merton, R. (1987). A simple model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information. Journal of Finance, 42, 483–510] model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information (CAPMI). In this context, hedging portfolios can be constructed and analytic formulas can be derived using the Black and Scholes technology or the martingale method. This paper presents a simple framework for the valuation of exotic derivatives and OTC traded securities in this context. We incorporate information costs into a model, and then use this new model to price a variety of exotic options using the general context in Bellalah [Bellalah, M. (2001). Market imperfections, information costs and the valuation of derivatives: Some general results. International Journal of Finance, 13, 1895–1928]. In each case, simple analytic formulae are derived.From a pedagogical viewpoint, we illustrate the methodology and propose simple analytic formulas for pay-on-exercise options, power derivatives, outperformance options, guaranteed exchange-rate contracts in foreign stock investments, equity-linked foreign exchange options and quantos in the same context. These formulae are simple and have the potential to explain some deviations with respect to the standard Black–Scholes model. We can use also stochastic volatilities and information costs to explain the smiles and skews found in options price data as in Bellalah, Prigent, and Villa [Bellalah, M., Prigent, J. L., & Villa, C. (2001). Skew without skewness: Asymmetric smiles, information costs and stochastic volatilitiy, International Journal of Finance, 2001, 1826, 1837] or Bellalah and Mahfoudh (2004) [Bellalah M. and Mahfoudh S. (2004). Option pricing under stochastic volatility with incomplete Information, Wilmott Magazine]. Our methodology can be applied for the valuation of several OTC and real options in the presence of incomplete information.     

Fixed-term employment contracts in an equilibrium search model

We develop a theoretical model of firm dynamics and unemployment and characterize equilibria with tenure dependent separation taxes. The model is a version of the Lucas and Prescott island model with undirected search. Two equivalent decentralizations are considered: one with spot labor markets and one with long-term employment relations. We model “temporary contracts” as the special case of a separation tax that only applies to workers with tenure higher than J. While in principle these contracts require a J-dimensional state space, equilibrium allocations solve a simple dynamic programming problem characterized by two-dimensional inaction set(s).     

On the Interplay of Hidden Action and Hidden Information in Simple Bilateral Trading Problems

A buyer and a seller can exchange one unit of an indivisible good. While producing the good, the seller can exert unobservable effort (hidden action). Then the buyer realizes whether his or her valuation is high or low, which stochastically depends upon the seller's effort level (hidden information). The parties are risk neutral—they can rule out renegotiation and write complete contracts. It is shown that the first best cannot be achieved whenever the ex post efficient trade decision is trivial. The second-best contract is characterized and an application of the model to the choice of risky projects is briefly discussed. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, C78, D23, D82.     

Environmental protection mechanisms and technological dynamics

The paper proposes a new financial mechanism that could be implemented to protect the environment of a tourist region. For this purpose, we investigate the potential consequences of two financial activities, issued by the local government (G) of a region R, which work like contracts between G and, respectively, visitors of R and firms operating in R. According to these contracts, agents who decide to visit R (firms that decide to adopt an environmental friendly technology) have to buy an option that entitle them to get a partial or total reimbursement if environmental quality in R turns out to be sufficiently low (high), namely, below (above) a given predetermined threshold level.     

Vertical integration and transaction-specific sunk costs

The purpose of this paper is to analyze vertical integration, long-term contracts and spot markets as institutional alternatives when transaction-specific investments are involved. Firm activities are divided into two periods. In the first period (the ex ante world), decisions on the amount of transaction-specific sunk costs are made, whereas after realization of a random state of the world, short-run production decisions are made (in the ex post world). The problem analyzed is to determine what form of organizations and/or contracts will emerge between upstream and downstream firms in the ex ante world to regulate their ex ante transaction-specific investments, if any, as well as their ex post production decisions and the distribution of resulting profits.     

Designing REDD+ contracts to resolve additionality issues

To address the issue of potential information asymmetries inherent in the estimation of deforestation baselines required by the current Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation+ (REDD+) scheme, we offer a theoretical analysis of an extended scheme relying on the theory of incentives. We compare two types of contracts: a deforestation-based contract and a policy-based contract. Each of them implies a dramatically different information rent/efficiency trade-off due to domestic implementation and transaction costs. If the contract is deforestation-based (resp. policy-based), information rents are awarded to countries with the ex ante lowest (resp. highest) intended deforestation. We show that a general contract can be offered to recipient countries in which the type of instrument proposed is endogenous, independent of the historical trend, unlike the current REDD+ mechanism. Dividing countries into two groups corresponding to the deforestation-based instrument and the policy-based instrument helps the donor country to obtain efficient deforestation and avoided deforestation levels.     

R&D,innovation activity,and the use of external numerical flexibility

We address theoretically and empirically the impact of R&D and innovation activity (IA) on the use of external numerical flexibility (ENF). We build a firm-sided model showing that a first-order stochastic dominance shift in the productivity distribution function decreases the probability of hiring workers with temporary contracts, while a second-order shift has ambiguous effects. Next, using a dataset based on a survey of Italian manufacturing firms, we find that R&D and IA increase the extensive and intensive margins of employing workers with temporary contracts. Moreover, we disentangle the impact of different types of R&D and IA, finding that extra muros R&D always has a positive effect, while the effect of intra muros R&D is generally null. Also the effect of IA changes according to the type of activity: positive with product innovation, null with process innovation.     

Competition, human capital and income inequality with limited commitment

We develop a dynamic model with two-sided limited commitment to study how barriers to competition, such as restrictions to business start-up and non-competitive covenants, affect the incentive to accumulate human capital. When contracts are not enforceable, high barriers lower the outside value of ‘skilled workers’ and reduce the incentive to accumulate human capital. In contrast, low barriers can result in over-accumulation of human capital. This can be socially optimal if there are positive spillovers. A calibration exercise shows that this mechanism can account for a sizable portion of cross-country income inequality.