We examine the role of information-based stock trading in affecting the risk-incentive relation. By incorporating an endogenous informed trading into an optimal incentive contracting model, we analytically show that, apart from reducing incentives, a greater risk increases the level of information-based trading which consequently enhances executive incentives and offsets the negative risk-incen...

A major concern with tradable emission permits is that stochastic permit prices may reduce a firm’s incentive to invest in abatement capital or technologies relative to other policies such as a fixed emissions charge. However, under efficient permit trading, the permit price uncertainty is caused by abatement cost uncertainties which affect investment under both permit and charge policies. We d...

We investigate the adverse selection problem where a principal delegates multiple tasks to an agent. We characterize the virtually implementable social choice functions by using the linking mechanism proposed by Jackson and Sonnenschein (2007) that restricts the message spaces. The principal does not require any incentive wage schemes and can therefore avoid any information rent and welfare los...

This paper explores the consequences of sabotage for the design of incentive contracts. The possibility of sabotage gives rise to a dynamic concern, similar to the Ratchet effect, which distorts the agents’ incentives. We first show that the mere possibility of sabotage may make it impossible to implement the first-best effort, and then offer two distinct incentive schemes, fast track and late ...

This paper summarizes early findings from a social experiment that provided financial incentives for new welfare recipients to leave welfare and work full time. The financial incentive was essentially a negative income tax with a requirement that people work at least 30 h/week. Early results show that the financial incentive increased full-time employment, earnings, and income, and reduced pove...

We provide a characterization of virtual Bayesian implementation in pure strategies for environments satisfying no-total-indifference. A social choice function in such environments is virtually Bayesian implementable if and only if it satisfies incentive compatibility and a condition we term virtual monotonicity. The latter is weaker than Bayesian monotonicity known to be necessary for Bayesian...

We study the relationship between the precision of information about the performance of an agent in a market, and the incentives this agent has for exerting effort to produce high quality. We show that this relationship is not monotonic. There exists a threshold beyond which any further improvement in the precision of information weakens the agent’s incentive to produce high quality. Accordingl...

We consider the class of Bayesian environments with independent types, and utility functions which are both quasi-linear in a private good and linear in a one-dimensional private-value type parameter. We call these independent linear environments. For these environments, we fully characterize interim efficient allocation rules which satisfy interim incentive compatibility and interim individual...

We analyze a game theoretic model of social learning about a consumption good with endogenous timing and heterogeneous accuracy of private information. We show that if individuals value their reputation for the degree to which they are informed, this reduces the incentive to learn by observing others and exacerbates the incentive to consume the good before others, i.e., to attempt to be an “opi...

Following Keen and Marchand (1997), the paper analyses the effect of fiscal competition on the composition of public spending in a model where capital and skilled workers are mobile while low skilled workers are immobile. Taxes are levied on capital and labour. Each group of workers benefits from a different kind of public good. Mobility of skilled workers provides an incentive for jurisdiction...