We consider a moral hazard setup wherein leveraged firms have incentives to take on excessive risks and are thus rationed when they attempt to borrow in order to meet liquidity shocks. The rationed firms can optimally pledge cash as collateral to borrow more, but in the process must liquidate some of their assets. Liquidated assets are purchased by non-rationed firms but their borrowing capacit...

Two principals engage in Hotelling competition for an agent's services under incomplete information as to her outside option (location). This renders the agent's participation decision probabilistic from the perspective of each principal. Regardless of the market structure at equilibrium the optimal contract features a trade-off between participation probability and incentives. Rent and effort ...

The hidden-action moral hazard model is one of the cornerstones of contract theory and it has become a basic tool to analyze job contracts and other agency relationships. Close social ties often implied by such relationships make the moral hazard model a prime application of approaches where agents care about inequity, and intrinsically reciprocate each others’ kind and hostile intentions. We c...

We study a discrete-time model of repeated moral hazard without commitment. In every period, a principal finances a project, choosing the scale of the project and a contingent payment plan for an agent, who has the opportunity to appropriate the returns of a successful project unbeknownst the principal. The absence of commitment is reflected both in the solution concept (perfect Bayesian equili...

We analyze a model of repeated bilateral trade with moral hazard, where the quality of goods received can di er from the quality despatched due to deterioration during transportation. Since the sender does not observe the quality of good received and the receiver does not observe the quality despatched, we have a repeated game with with imperfect monitoring by private signals. The stage game ha...

Cyberinsurance is a powerful tool to align market incentives toward improving Internet security. We trace the evolution of cyberinsurance from traditional insurance policies to early cyber-risk insurance policies to current comprehensive cyberinsurance products. We find that increasing Internet security risk in combination with the need for compliance with recent corporate legislation has contr...

To control the deer population, state game commissions regulate the types of deer that can be legally harvested. These regulations, however, might have an unintended effect on hunting-related accidents by changing the care hunters take when firing their rifles—a moral hazard effect—or changing the composition of hunters. Using detailed data on hunting accidents and regulations in Pennsylvania c...

T he doctrine of human rights has come to play a distinctive role in international life. This is primarily the role of a moral touchstone—a standard of assessment and criticism for domestic institutions, a standard of aspiration for their reform, and increasingly a standard of evaluation for the policies and practices of international economic and political institutions. International practice ...

This paper studies the impact of financial constraints on the persistency of high markups in a class of markets, including public procurement, known by practitioners as bidding markets. We develop an infinite horizon model in which two firms optimally reinvest working capital and bid for a procurement contract each period. Working capital is constrained by the firm’s cash from previous period a...