The paper studies outside finance in a model of two-dimensional moral hazard, involving risk choices as well as effort choices. If the entrepreneur has insufficient funds, a first-best outcome cannot be implemented. Second-best outcomes involve greater failure risk than first-best outcomes. For a Cobb-Douglas technology, second-best effort and investment levels are smaller than first-best; for other technologies, the comparison depends on the elasticity of substitution. If firm returns are not too noisy as signals of behaviour, the optimal incentive scheme corresponds to some mix of debt and equity finance. If firm returns are too noisy, this interpretation is not available.

This paper develops a technique for studying incentive problems with unidimensional hidden characteristics in a way that is independent of whether the type set is finite, the type distribution has a continuous density, or the type distribution has both mass points and an atomless part. By this technique, the proposition that optimal incentive schemes induce no distortion “at the top” and downward distortions “below the top” is extended to arbitrary type distributions. However, mass points in the interior of the type set require pooling with adjacent higher types and, unless there are other complications, a discontinuous jump in the transition from adjacent lower types.

For a nonexcludable public good with benefit and cost functions independent of the number of participants, this paper studies second-best allocations under Bayesian interim incentive compatibility and interim individual rationality. As the number of participants becomes large, second-best provision levels converge in distribution to first-best levels if the latter are bounded. Second-best provision levels become large in absolute terms but small relative to first-best levels if benefit and cost functions are isoelastic. In contrast, for an excludable public good, the ratio of second-best to first-best levels is bounded away from zero. Copyright The Review of Economic Studies Limited, 2003.

[The paper analyzes borrowing and lending on uncertain future income, with a positive probability of bankruptcy. Creditor and debtor play a strategic game, in which it is shown that optimal creditor behavior is not generally well defined. The model suggests that under uncertainty the availability of credit may be restricted below that which would be predicted by classical microeconomic theory.]

The relation between perfectly competitive and monopolistically competitive equilibria is analysed for a Bertrand-Edgeworth model of a single market in which capacity constrained firms choose prices as strategies. The market always has a Nash equilibrium in pure or mixed strategies. As the number of firms increases, the corresponding equilibria converge in distribution to a perfectly competitive price. This result provides a justification for perfect competition that is based on an explicit account of price formation. However, monopoly prices persist with a positive but vanishing probability. Regularity or well defined inverse demand functions are not required.

We study the relation between mechanism design and voting in public good provision. If incentive mechanisms must satisfy conditions of robust coalition-proofness as well as robust incentive compatibility, the participants' contributions to public good provision can only depend on the level of the public good that is provided and that level can only depend on the population shares of people favouring one level over another. For a public good that comes as a single indivisible unit the outcome depends on whether or not the share of votes in favour of provision exceeds a specified threshold. With more provision levels for the public good, more complicated mechanisms can be used but they still involve the counting of votes rather than any measurement of the participants' willingness to pay. The article thus provides a foundation for the use of voting mechanisms.

In a simple model of borrowing and lending with asymmetric information we show that the optimal, incentive-compatible debt contract is the standard debt contract. The second-best level of investment never exceeds the first-best and is strictly less when there is a positive probability of costly bankruptcy. We also compare the second-best with the results of interest-rate-taking behaviour and consider the effects of risk aversion. Finally we provide conditions under which increasing the borrower's initial net wealth must reduce total investment in the venture.

Duncan K. Foley, Martin F. Hellwig; Asset Management with Trading Uncertainty12, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 42, Issue 3, 1 July 1975, Pages 327