We analyse renegotiation in a hidden action principal-agent model. Contract renegotiation offers are made by the agent. A refinement is imposed on the principal's beliefs: if precisely one action is optimal with respect to both the principal's and the agent's contracts, the principal believes that that action has been taken. With the refinement imposed, perfect-Bayesian equilibrium allocations are identical to the second best in the classical principal-agent model without renegotiation. When renegotiation is led by the agent and when equilibria satisfy the refinement, equilibrium allocations are ex ante efficient.
This paper characterizes interim efficient mechanisms for public good production and cost allocation in a two-type environment with risk-neutral, quasi-linear preferences and fixed-size projects, where the distribution of the private good, as well as the public goods decision, affects social welfare. An efficient public good decision can always be accomplished by a majority voting scheme, where the number of “YES” votes required depends on the welfare weights in a simple way. The results are shown to have a natural geometry and an intuitive interpretation. We also extend these results to allow for restrictions on feasible transfer rules, ranging from the traditional unlimited transfers to the extreme case of no transfers. For a range of welfare weights, an optimal scheme is a two-stage procedure which combines a voting stage with a second stage where an even-chance lottery is used to determine who pays. We call this the “lottery draft mechanism” Since such a cost-sharing scheme does not require transfers, it follows that in many cases transfers are not necessary to achieve the optimal allocation. For other ranges of welfare weights the second stage is more complicated, but the voting stage remains the same. If transfers are completely infeasible, randomized voting rules may be optimal. The paper also provides a geometric characterization of the effects of voluntary participation constraints.
When market information such as price is difficult to communicate, consumers and firms may be unable to take advantage of mutually beneficial scale economies, so that coordination failures arise. Ostensibly uninformative advertising expenditures can be used to eliminate coordination failures, by allowing an efficient firm to communicate implicitly that it offers a low price. This provides a theoretical explanation for Benham's (1972) empirical association of the ability to advertise with lower prices and larger scale. Advertising becomes necessary for optimal coordination when the identity of the efficient firm is uncertain. An application to loss-leader pricing is developed.
Under the 'conservative equal costs' mechanism to produce a nonexcludable public good, each agent reports his demand. The lowest reported demand is produced and its cost is shared equally among all agents. When the cost of producing the public good is convex, this mechanism is strategy-proof, anonymous, and induces voluntary participation. No other mechanism shares these three properties. When the public good is excludable, there is a mechanism with the same properties that everyone prefers to conservative equal costs. This mechanism excludes the agent with the lowest demand from consuming a larger amount of the good, ameliorating the free-rider problem. Copyright 1994 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.
The purpose of this paper is to estimate the parameters of household preferences that determine the allocation of goods within the period and over the life cycle, using micro data. In doing so we are able to identify important effects of demographics, labour market status and other household characteristics on the intertemporal allocation of expenditure. We test the validity of the life-cycle model using excess sensitivity tests and find that controlling for demographics and labour market status variables can largely explain the excess sensitivity of consumption to anticipated changes in income.
The semiparametric efficiency bound of the mixed proportional hazard model is derived. The density factors in such a way that there exists a complete sufficient statistic for the individual heterogeneity. The efficient score is shown to be the difference between the score in the parametric direction and its conditional expectation given the sufficient statistic. Applying this result to the single-spell Weibull mixed proportional hazard model, it is shown that its information matrix is singular and there cannot exist any [square root]n-consistent estimator sequence. The information of the multi-spell Weibull mixed proportional hazard model is shown to be nonsingular in general. Copyright 1994 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.
This paper employs a dynamic Ricardian trade model to provide a decomposition of the gains from trade into 'once-off' and continuing categories. In one version of the model, trade is always welfare enhancing; in the other, once-off losses may occur alongside dynamic gains. In both versions, the magnitude of once-off and continuing effects are related to absolute and relative country size, similarity in production structures, rates of time preference, and the productivity of R&D. Copyright 1994 by The Review of Economic Studies Limited.
In dynamic models of unemployment in which the employed consume more than the unemployed, workers are finitely lived, and jobs are lasting, employment transfers consumption from future generations to those currently alive, resulting in a social surplus. That is, these transfers allow the current generation to consume more than its share of the output produced during its lifetime, without the increased consumption coming at the expense of future generations. Moreover, due to these intergenerational transfers, the allocation that maximizes steady-state output is Pareto dominated by another feasible allocation with a higher level of steady-state employment.
We study positive and normative aspects of steady-state equilibrium in a market where firms of endogenous size experience idiosyncratic shocks and undergo a costly search process to hire their workers. The stylized model we propose highlights interactions between job-security provisions and sectoral shocks in determining the natural rate of unemployment, the allocation of labour, and the extent of labour hoarding, and rationalizes cross-sectional asymmetries of gross employment flows at the firm level. In our model, where productivity and search costs are dynamically heterogeneous across firms, decentralized wage bargains imply important cross-sectional inefficiencies, which overshadow the static search inefficiencies on which simpler models focus.
In this paper, we analyse the existence and uniqueness of equilibrium in a particular class of monopolistic rational expectations models. We show the equivalence between the Kyle (1985) model of insider trading where the insider observes the amount of noise trading and the Kyle (1989) model of informed speculation when there is one risk-neutral insider and many risk-neutral market makers. We show that in these two equivalent models: (i) There exists a unique equilibrium independently of the distribution of uncertainty; (ii) This equilibrium minimizes the expected gains of the informed agent under incentive compatibility constraints. We extend our results to a class of signalling games.