Download or read book Essays on Contracting Problems written by Sung-Bong Cho and published by . This book was released on 1991 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Contracting Problems written by and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 121 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This thesis contains three chapters regarding applications of contracting problems to different topics. The first chapter studies the optimal joint design of disability insurance and unemployment insurance in an environment with moral hazard, when health status is private information, and cyclical fluctuations. I show how disability benefits and unemployment benefits vary with aggregate economic conditions in an optimal contract. I then consider a calibrated version of the full model and study the quantitative implications of both the current system and the optimal system. In the optimal system, disability benefits are designed such that the system punishes workers who stay unemployed for a long time. Finally, I consider the welfare impact of changing from the current system to the optimal one when both systems provide the same ex-ante utility to the worker. The cost savings incurred from handling the incentive problems are substantial, ranging from 45 percent to 101 percent for different workers, and the unemployment rate could be reduced by roughly 50 percent. The second chapter is about non-stationary two-sided learning in continuous time. This paper studies the multi-period contracting problem when actions of an agent are unobservable and both parties disagree on the agent's ability. The question being asked is how the actions would be affected when the amount of disagreement is another motivating factor. I derive the necessary and sufficient conditions for incentive compatibility of contracts. I then use results from stochastic analysis to transform the problem into one that can be solved numerically using Monte Carlo simulations. My results exhibit an interesting pattern: effort is no longer front-loaded as in the related work of Prat and Jovanovic (2013), and responses to incentives are significant when the terminal date approaches. The third chapter discusses anti-dumping duties and money burning. I show that with delegated decisions and private information, optimal trade agreements could consist of tariff caps as well as burning money before high tariff sanctions are used.

Download or read book Essays on Contract Design and Incentive Provision written by Eva I. Hoppe-Fischer and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-02-19 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contract theory, which emphasizes the importance of unverifiable actions and private information, has been a highly active field of research in microeconomics in the last decades. This thesis is divided into two parts. Part I consists of three chapters that study contract-theoretic models which are motivated by the classic procurement problem of a principal who wants an agent to deliver a certain good or service. In such models it is typically assumed that decision makers are interested in their own monetary payoffs only. Moreover, they have unlimited cognitive abilities and behave in a perfectly rational way. Yet, in practice people often do not behave this way. While empirical research is very difficult in contract theory, laboratory experiments have recently turned out to be an important source of data. In Part II, three experimental studies are presented that investigate contract-theoretic problems brought up in Part I.

Download or read book Three Essays on Contract Theory and Applications written by Sunjoo Hwang and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 286 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay examines a general theory of information based on informal contracting. The measurement problem--the disparity of true and measured performances--is at the core of many failures in incentive systems. Informal contracting can be a potential solution since, unlike in formal contracting, it can utilize a lot of qualitative and informative signals. However, informal contracting must be self-enforced. Given this trade-off between informativeness and self-enforcement, I show that a new source of statistical information is economically valuable in informal con- tracting if and only if it is sufficiently informative that it refines the existing pass/fail criterion. I also find that a new information is more likely valuable, as the stock of existing information is large. This information theory has implications on the measurement problem, a puzzle of relative performance evaluation and human resources management. I also provide a methodological contribution. For tractable analysis, the first-order approach (FOA) should be employed. Existing FOA-justifying conditions (e.g. the Mirrlees-Rogerson condition) are so strong that the information ranking condition can be applied only to a small set of information structures. Instead, I find a weak FOA- justifying condition, which holds in many prominent examples (with multi- variate normal or some of univariate exponential family distributions). The second essay analyzes the effectiveness of managerial punishments in mitigating moral hazard problem of government bailouts. Government bailouts of systemically important financial or industrial firms are necessary ex-post but cause moral hazard ex-ante. A seemingly perfect solution to this time-inconsistency problem is saving a firm while punishing its manager. I show that this idea does not necessarily work if ownership and management are separated. In this case, the shareholder(s) of the firm has to motivate the manager by using incentive contracts. Managerial punishments (such as Obama's $500,000 bonus cap) could distort the incentive-contracting program. The shareholder's ability to motivate the manager could then be reduced and thereby moral hazard could be exacerbated depending on corporate governance structures and punishment measures, which means the likelihood of future bailouts increases. As an alternative, I discuss the effectiveness of shareholder punishments. The third essay analyzes how education affect workers' career-concerns. A person's life consists of two important stages: the first stage as a student and the second stage as a worker. In order to address how a person chooses an education-career path, I examine an integrated model of education and career-concerns. In the first part, I analyze the welfare effect of education. In Spence's job market signaling model, education as a sorting device improves efficiency by mitigating the lemon market problem. In my integrated model, by contrast, education as a sorting device can be detrimental to social welfare, as it eliminates the work incentive generated by career-concerns. In this regard, I suggest scholarship programs aimed at building human capital rather than sorting students. The second part provides a new perspective on education: education is job-risk hedging device (as well as human capital enhancing or sorting device). I show that highly risk-averse people take high education in order to hedge job-risk and pursue safe but medium-return work path. In contrast, lowly risk-averse people take low education, bear job-risk, and pursue high-risk high-return work path. This explains why some people finish college early and begin start-ups, whereas others take master's or Ph.D. degrees and find safe but stable jobs.

Download or read book Two Essays on Agency Problems and Contracting written by Lei Mao and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 156 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Theory of Contract Law written by Peter Benson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-02-05 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays addressing a variety of issues in the theory and practice of contract law.

Download or read book Siegel s Contracts written by Brian N. Siegel and published by Aspen Publishing. This book was released on 2012-03-21 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A proven resource for high performance, the Siegel’s series keeps you focused on the only thing that matters – the exam. The Siegel’s series relies on a powerful Q&A format, featuring multiple-choice questions at varying levels of difficulty, as well as essay questions to give you practice issue-spotting and analyzing the law. Answers to multiple-choice questions explain why one choice is correct as well as why the other choices are wrong, to ensure complete understanding. An entire chapter is devoted to teaching you how to prepare effectively for essay exams. The chapter provides instruction, advice, and exam-taking tips that help you make the most of your study time. A wonderful resource for practice in answering the types of questions your professor will ask on your exam, the Siegel’s Series will prove valuable in the days or weeks leading up to your final. Features: Exposing you to the types of questions your professor will ask on the exam, Siegel’s will prove valuable in the days or weeks leading up to your final. A great number of questions at the appropriate level of difficulty—20 to 30 essay Q&As and 90 to 100 multiple-choice Q&As—provide opportunity for you to practice spotting issues as you apply your knowledge of the law. Essay questions give you solid practice writing concise essay answers, and the model answers allow you to check your work. An entire chapter is devoted to preparing for essay exams. In checking your answers to multiple-choice questions, you can figure out where you may have erred: Answers explain why one choice is correct and the other choices are wrong. To help you learn to make the most of your study time, the introductory chapter gives instruction, advice, and tips for preparing for and taking essay exams . The table of contents helps you prepare for exams by clearly outlining the topics tested in each Essay question. In addition, you can locate questions covering topics you’re having difficulty with by checking the index. Revised by law school professors, the Siegel’s Series is updated on a regular basis.

Download or read book Three Essays on Contracting and Corporate Financing written by and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Contract Design written by Walter Alberto Cont and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Contracting written by Arthur Morris and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays in Contract Theory written by Fei-Lung Tzang and published by . This book was released on 2008 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Essays on Two Sided Matching with Contracts written by Daniel Aaron Ripperger-Suhler and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation consists of three chapters that examine contracting problems in two-sided matching models. The first chapter studies use of syndication contracts in the venture capital matching market, and the resulting impact on portfolio company outcomes. A novel empirical model is developed to account for endogeneity issues due to matching between venture capitalists (VCs) and companies as well as the simultaneous causality bias coming from contract choice. The estimates show that unobserved company heterogeneity can lead to biased company outcome estimates, which can change over time due to changes in preferences over unobserved company characteristics. The second chapter, joint with Kaniska Dam and Konstantinos Serfes, explores the effect of incentives on choice of organizational structure, and the implications for the output distribution in two-sided matching model. A novel condition guaranteeing positive assortative matching (PAM) is derived for two-sided matching models with non-smooth bargaining frontiers. In the model, the choice between integrating and remaining separate results in a non-differentiable bargaining frontier and produces equilibria in which some matched pairs integrate, and others do not integrate. These equilibria produce drastically different output distributions and provide researchers with predictions that can be tested empirically. The final chapter considers a principal-agent model in which the agent can choose and exclusive contract with a single principal, or a non-exclusive contract with two principals at the cost of additional effort. The two-sided matching model shows that the endogenous outside option absent in a standard principal-agent model is necessary in order to generate certain equilibrium contract patterns. Finally, the model shows that changes in the costliness of additional effort by the agents has a non-monotonic impact of agent utility.

Download or read book Essays on Dynamic Contracting written by Ilia Krasikov and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The thesis focuses on understanding the dynamic nature of contracts used in various economic context, specifically financial economics and industrial organization. The first chapter "A Theory of Dynamic Contracting with Financial Constraints'' draws on a large empirical literature documenting that small businesses are financially constrained, and operate at an inefficient level. In the paper, we build a theoretical model where financial constraints arise endogenously as a product of interaction between persistent agency frictions and agent's inability to raise external capital.The paper makes two general points. First, efficiency is a certainty in the long run, and it is achieved through monotone slacking of financial constraints. Second, persistence makes the path towards efficiency much more constrained in comparison to the model with the iid technology. In particular, we show that dynamic agency models with persistence predict a larger cross section of firms in the economy to be financially constrained.At a technical level, we invoke the recursive approach of \citet{aps}, using a two-dimensional vector of promised utilities as a state variable. We show that the optimal contract always stays in a strict subset of the recursive domain termed the shell, and the optimal contract is monotone within this set. We also verify that the results continue to hold in continuous time.The second chapter "Dynamic Contracts with Unequal Discounting'' looks at dynamic screening with soft financial constraints. In contrast to the first paper, the agent can raise money but at a different rate than the principal.We solve for the optimal contract and show that efficiency is not attainable with soft financial constraints. Therefore, the predictions of dynamic models of mechanism design are not robust to the assumption of equal discounting. For the large set of parameters, the optimal contract has the restart property- dynamic distortions are a function of the number of consecutive bad shocks, and once the good shock arrives the process repeats again. We also show that restricting attention to contracts which have the restart property is in general approximately optimal. The endogenous resetting aspect of restart contracts shares features of various contracts used in practice.In the third chapter "On Dynamic Pricing'', we explore dynamic price discrimination, extending a canonical model of monopolistic screening to repeated sales, where a seller uses timing of purchases as a screening instrument. The importance of time as an instrument for price discrimination has been understood since Varian [1989].In the paper, we are aiming to provide a formal analysis of pricing strategies to discriminate amongst consumers based on the timing of information arrival and/or the timing of purchase.A seller repeatedly trades with a buyer. Buyer's valuations for the trade follow a renewal process; that is, they change infrequently at random dates. For the model with two periods, We show that selling the first period good for a spot price and selling the second period good by optioning a sequence of forwards is the optimal pricing strategy. Specifically, at the outset, the seller offers an American option which can be exercised in each of the two periods. Exercising the option grants the buyer with a forward- an obligation to purchase the second period good for a specific price, and a strike price- a right to buy (or not) the good in the second period after learning his value. The buyer with a high valuation exercises the option in the first period, whereas one with a low valuation waits until the second period and then takes a call.We extend the analysis to the general continuous time renewal processes and assess the performance of price discrimination based on American options on forwards:i.optioning forwards is shown to be the deterministic optimum for the sequential screening problem- when the seller makes a sale in a single fixed period;ii.optioning forwards is shown to be the exact optimum for the repeated sales problem in the restricted class of strongly monotone contracts- when allocative distortions are monotone in a whole vector of buyer's valuations;iii.the optimum for the repeated sales problem in the unrestricted class of contracts is shown to be backloaded and a theoretical bound is provided for the fraction of optimal revenue that can be extracted by optioning forwards.Finally, the construction of dynamic pricing mechanism and bounds is ported to study repeated auctions.

Download or read book Essays on Contract Theory written by Alice Peng-Ju Su and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation is primarily on the contractual design to account for various source of information asymmetry in a principal-agent(s) relationship. In the first chapter, I study the optimal provision of team incentives with the feasibility for the agents to coordinate private actions through repeated interaction with imperfect public monitoring. As the agents' imperfect monitoring of private actions is inferred from the stochastically correlated measurements, correlation of measurement noise, besides its risk sharing role in the conventional multiple-agent moral hazard problem, is crucial to the accuracy of each agent's inference on the other's private action. The principal's choice of performance pay to provide incentive via inducing competition or coordination among the agents thus exhibits the tradeoff between risk sharing and mutual inference between the agents. I characterize the optimal form of performance pay with respect to the correlation of measurement noise and find that it is not monotonic as suggested by the literature. In the second chapter, I study the optimal incentive provision in a principal-agent relationship with costly information acquisition by the agent. When it is feasible for the principal to induce or to deter perfect information acquisition, adverse selection or moral hazard arises in response to the principal's decision, as if she is able to design a contract not only to cope with an existing incentive problem, but also to implement the existence of an incentive problem. The optimal contract to implement adverse selection by inducing information acquisition, comparing to the second best menu, exhibits a larger rent difference between an agent in an efficient state and whom in an inefficient state. The optimal contract to implement moral hazard by deterring information acquisition, comparing to the second best debt contract, prescribes a lower debt and an equity share of output residual. With imperfect information acquisition or private knowledge of information acquiring cost, the contract offered to an uninformed agent is qualitatively robust, and that to the informed exhibits countervailing incentives. I relax the assumption of complete contracting and study truthful information revelation in an incomplete contracting environment in the third chapter. Truthful revelation of asymmetric information through shared ownership (partnership) is incorporated into the Property Right Theory of the firms. Shared ownership is optimal as an information transmission device, when it is incentive compatible within the relationship as well as when the relationship breaks, at the expense of the ex-ante incentive to invest in the relationship-specific asset as the hold-up concern is not efficiently mitigated. Higher (lower) level of integration is optimal with a lower marginal value of asset if the information rent effect is stronger (weaker) than the hold-up effect.

Download or read book Essays in Dynamic Contract Theory written by Rui Zhao and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Justice and the Social Contract written by Samuel Freeman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2009-04-24 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel Freeman was a student of the influential philosopher John Rawls, he has edited numerous books dedicated to Rawls' work and is arguably Rawls' foremost interpreter. This volume collects new and previously published articles by Freeman on Rawls. Among other things, Freeman places Rawls within historical context in the social contract tradition, and thoughtfully addresses criticisms of this position. Not only is Freeman a leading authority on Rawls, but he is an excellent thinker in his own right, and these articles will be useful to a wide range of scholars interested in Rawls and the expanse of his influence.

Download or read book Essays on Contract written by P. S. Atiyah and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: P.S. Atiyah is one of the leading contract theorists of the common law world. These previously published essays, all revised or rewritten for this edition, constitute a comprehensive account of Atiyah's thoughts on the theory and foundation of contractual liability over the last twenty years, and include the author's replies to criticisms previously made of his work.