The value of information in a principal-agent model with moral hazard: The ex post contracting case

In a principal-agent model with moral hazard, a signal about the principal?s technology — the stochastic mapping from the agent?s action to the outcome — is observed before the contract is offered. The signal is either uninformative (null information), informative and observed only by the principal (private information), or also observed by the agent (public information). We show that, from an ex ante standpoint (before the signal is observed): (i) the agent prefers private to both null and public information; (ii) the principal sometimes prefers null to both private and public information; and (iii) when the principal prefers public to null information, she prefers public to private information, whereas the agent prefers private to public information. In this last situation, we also show that (iv) for any separating equilibrium with private information, there exists a contract with public information that both strictly prefer.     

Investment timing and learning externalities

We study a duopoly model of investment, in which each player learns about the quality of a common value project by observing some public background information, and possibly the experience of his rival. Investment costs are private information, and the background signal takes the form of a Poisson process conditional on the quality of the project being low. The resulting attrition game has a unique, symmetric equilibrium, which depends on initial public beliefs. We determine the impact of changes in the cost and signal distributions on investment timing, and how equilibrium is affected when a first-mover advantage is introduced.     

A note on redistributive fairness and economic reform

To understand reasons for possible failures of ‘good’ economic reforms, we consider an institution which is always successful in making the best public decision from the utilitarian perspective. We show it is bound to introduce inequality if costs of a reform are privately known: the losers can not be always compensated. Thus, if equity is a primary concern, then some reforms with positive aggregate net gain might not be undertaken. If the utilitarian welfare is the only guide for making public decisions, implementing a reform might require the ability to ignore the associated social costs of inequality.     

Efficiency and consistency for locating multiple public facilities

In the problem of locating multiple public facilities studied by Barberà and Beviá [Self-selection consistent functions, J. Econ. Theory 105 (2002) 263-277; Locating public facilities by majority: stability, consistency and group formation, Games Econ. Behav. 56 (2006) 185-200], we offer simple necessary and sufficient conditions for efficiency, decentralizability of efficient decisions in a game of community division and local public goods provision, and a constructive algorithm for efficient and consistent decisions.     

The emerging aversion to inequality

This paper provides evidence of the changing attitudes to inequality during transition to the market in Poland. Using repeated cross-sections of the population, it identifies a structural break in the relationship between income inequality and satisfaction. Whereas in the first stage of the transition process, an increase in income inequality was interpreted by the population as a positive signal of wider opportunities, later in the transition period increased inequality became a factor in dissatisfaction with the country's economic situation. This was accompanied by increasing public sentiment that the process of income distribution is flawed and corrupt.     

Externalities and fundamental nonconvexities: A reconciliation of approaches to general equilibrium externality modeling and implications for decentralization

Starrett (1972) [33] and Boyd and Conley (1997) [7] approaches to externality modeling are unified by distinguishing between producible and nonproducible public commodities. Nonconvexities are associated with detrimental producible public commodities but not with nonproducible public commodities in Boyd and Conley (1997) [7]. Disposability properties (costly or costless) imply that producible public commodities are either by-products (e.g., pollution) or joint-products (e.g., national defense). Markets fail for both beneficial and detrimental by-products. Nonconvexities imply that price-based equilibria, e.g., Pigovian tax equilibrium, may not be Pareto-efficient. Foley's (1967, 1970) [17] and [18] “public competitive equilibrium” combines price and quantity signals with a unanimity criterion and restores the equivalence between equilibrium and efficiency.     

Insider trading with public and shared information

We study the impact of public information and shared information on traders' trading behavior in the context of Kyle's (1985) speculative market. We suppose that there are four types of traders in our model: one insider, M outsiders, liquidity traders, and market makers. We explicitly describe the unique linear Nash equilibrium and find that public information harms the insider but benefits the outsiders and noise traders. Also, the market is more efficient because of the existence of public information.     

Coordination failure in repeated games with private monitoring

Players coordinate continuation play in repeated games with public monitoring. We investigate the robustness of such equilibrium behavior with respect to ex-ante small private-monitoring perturbations. We show that with full support of public signals, no perfect public equilibrium is robust if it induces a “regular” 2×2$2\times 2$ coordination game in the continuation play. This regularity condition is violated in all belief-free equilibria. Indeed, with an individual full rank condition, every interior belief-free equilibrium is robust. We also analyze block belief-free equilibria and point out that the notion of robustness is sensitive to whether we allow for uninterpretable signals.     

Stable partnerships, matching, and local public goods

In the presence of local public goods differences in tastes are an important determinant of the way in which partnerships are formed. Heterogeneity in tastes for private vs. public goods produces a tendency to positive assortment and partnerships of couples with similar tastes; heterogeneity in tastes for different public goods brings about partnerships of couples with similar tastes only if there is a significant overlap in the distribution of tastes of the two groups to be matched. We show that with two public goods we may get negative assortment, pure positive assortment being only one of many possibilities.     

Priorities in the location of multiple public facilities

A collective decision problem is described by a set of agents, a profile of single-peaked preferences over the real line and a number of public facilities to be located. We consider public facilities that do not suffer from congestion and are non-excludable. We characterize the class of rules satisfying Pareto-efficiency, object-population monotonicity and sovereignty. Each rule in the class is a priority rule that selects locations according to a predetermined priority ordering among “interest groups”. We characterize the subclasses of priority rules that respectively satisfy anonymity, avoid the no-show paradox, strategy-proofness and population-monotonicity. In particular, we prove that a priority rule is strategy-proof if and only if it partitions the set of agents into a fixed hierarchy. Any such rule can also be viewed as a collection of generalized peak-selection median rules, that are linked across populations, in a way that we describe.     

Information acquisition and full surplus extraction

It is well known that when agents' types are correlated, the mechanism designer can extract the entire surplus. This creates an incentive for agents to acquire information about other agents' types. Robust lotteries (are payment schemes that) support full extraction and partially robust lotteries support efficient implementation in the presence of information acquisition opportunities. Necessary and sufficient conditions for existence of robust and partially robust lotteries are derived. If an agent's information signal spans other agents' types then robust lotteries do not exist. However, if all agents report their signal realizations then robust lotteries exist in an extended type space.     

INFLUENCING THE PUBLIC AND EFFICIENCY IN BUREAUCRATIC PROVISION

Abstract.  In the present paper a public bureau can extract additional budgetary allocations, not only by misreporting its production cost to its oversight committee but also by 'influencing' the perceptions of the public at large. I juxtapose the bureau's ability to influence the public with its ability to misreport to the oversight committee, and find that influencing the public might support an efficient level of production by invoking a separating equilibrium. However, a pooling equilibrium involving either overproduction or underproduction of output cannot be ruled out. Accordingly, overproduction could occur even when the bureau cares only about extracting excess budget and not increasing output per se.     

Optimal ownership of public goods reconsidered

Consider a non-governmental organization (NGO) that can invest in a public good. Should the government or the NGO own the public project? In an incomplete contracting framework with split-the-difference bargaining, Besley and Ghatak (2001) argue that the party who values the public good most should be the owner. We demonstrate the robustness of their insight when the split-the-difference rule is replaced by the deal-me-out solution. Our finding is in contrast to the private good results of Chiu (1998) and De Meza and Lockwood (1998), who show that the optimal ownership structure crucially depends on whether the split-the-difference rule or the deal-me-out solution is used.     

Quality undersupply and oversupply

I analyze a market in which a price-taking buyer buys a variable-quality good from a population of sellers, contrasting the case where quality is a seller's private information to that where it is public information. Average quality traded under private information can be either higher (quality oversupply) or lower (quality undersupply) than under public information, depending on sellers’ preferences. We are likely to see quality undersupply if (i) sellers’ preferences exhibit substitutability between the variable-quality good and the numéraire good, and/or (ii) sellers view the numéraire good as a luxury good relative to the variable-quality good. Reverse arguments hold for quality oversupply.     

Pricing and signaling with frictions

We study a market where each seller chooses the quality and price of goods and the number of selling sites. Observing sellers? choices of prices and sites, but not quality, buyers choose which site to visit. A seller?s choices of prices can direct buyers? search and signal quality. A unique equilibrium exists and is separating. When the quality differential is large, the equilibrium implements the efficient allocation with public information. Otherwise, the quality of goods and/or the number of sites created is inefficient, due to a conflict between the search-directing and signaling roles of prices.     

Matching with noise and the acceptance curse

This paper explores matching with both search and information frictions. Specifically, everyone observes only a noisy signal of the true type of any potential mate. In this context, matching decisions must incorporate not only information about a partner's attribute conveyed by the noisy signal, but also—as in the winner's curse in auction theory—information about a partner's type contained in his or her acceptance decision.We show that there exists an equilibrium exhibiting a stochastic positive assorting of types, generalizing [Becker, J. Polit. Economy 81 (1973) 813-846]. In equilibrium, selection is adverse: being accepted reduces an agent's estimate of a potential partner's type, a phenomenon that we call the acceptance curse effect.     

On the informational inefficiency of discriminatory price auctions

We analyze bidding behavior in large discriminatory-price auctions in a common value setting where the number of objects is a non-trivial proportion of the number of bidders. We show that the average price paid in the auction is biased downward from the expected value of the objects, even in the competitive limit. We show that conditional on a signal that falls below a threshold, a bidder bids no more than the expected value of an object conditional on the signal and winning; while conditional on any signal that lies above the threshold the bid is strictly lower than the expected value conditional on the signal and winning.     

The relative contributions of private information sharing and public information releases to information aggregation

We calculate learning rates when agents are informed through public and private observation of other agents' actions. We characterize the evolution of the distribution of posterior beliefs. If the private learning channel is present, convergence of the distribution of beliefs to the perfect-information limit is exponential at a rate equal to the sum of the mean arrival rate of public information and the mean rate at which individual agents are randomly matched with other agents. If, however, there is no private information sharing, then convergence is exponential at a rate strictly lower than the mean arrival rate of public information.     

Heterogeneity, returns to scale, and collective action

Abstract .  I analyze the effects of resource inequality and valuation heterogeneity on the provision of public goods with increasing or decreasing returns to scale in production. The existing literature typically takes the agents' characteristics as given and known to the researcher. In contrast, this paper compares collective action provision across groups of agents with resources and valuations for the public good drawn from different known joint distributions. Specifically, I characterize the expected equilibrium public good level as function of various distributional properties and moments. A resource-valuation distribution that first-order stochastically dominates another distribution always results in higher expected public good provision level, independent of the production technology. With decreasing returns to scale in the public good production, higher resource inequality results in higher expected provision. With increasing returns the same result holds when the mean resource level is relatively low, but expected provision decreases in inequality when the mean resource level is high. A parallel result holds for agents' valuations.     

Citizens’ trust in government and their willingness-to-pay

We employ the Hicksian compensating variation and a citizen’s subjective perspective on trustworthiness of government, and draw a positive association between citizens’ trust in government and their willingness-to-pay. Our finding suggests that public projects can be hindered by prevailing distrust toward government.