In this paper, I study the e¤ects of overcon…dence on incentive contracts in a moral-hazard framework in which principal and agent knowingly hold asymmetric beliefs regarding the probability of success of their enterprise. Agent overcon…dence can have con‡icting e¤ects on the equilibrium contract. On the one hand, an overcon…dent agent disproportionately values successcontingent payments, and t...

The recent global financial crisis may have lessons for ecologists. One driver of the problems many countries faced toward the end of the previous decade was risky speculation by larger banks (Okamoto, 2009). In cases where such investments succeed, the bank is the winner. When such investments fail they have the potential to ruin the bank. However, the largest banks are often deemed to be so i...

Among naturalist philosophers, both defenders and opponents of moral relativism argue that prescriptive moral theories (or normative theories) should be constrained by empirical findings about human psychology. Empiricists have asked if people are or can be moral relativists, and what effect being a moral relativist can have on an individual’s moral functioning. This research is underutilized i...

We analyze the formation of partnerships as a sequential game with moral hazard within coalitions; once formed, partnerships compete a la Cournot in the marketplace. When moral hazard within coalitions is very severe, no partnership will form. However, we show that when moral hazard is not too severe the coalition structure will be either similar to or more concentrated than it is without moral...

This paper investigates the equilibrium consequences of a contractual market with moral hazard where multiple principals compete each other to offer incentive contracts to agents who choose unobservable ex post actions. We show the following limit theorems: First, when the trade–off between incentive and risk sharing causes the moral hazard problem on the side of agents, the full insurance cont...

It has been argued that when management is more concerned with the firm’s survival than with profitability, it is efficient to use a levered capital structure and thereby commit to the transfer of the liquidation decision to lenders. Our paper analyzes this view in a setting where lenders may behave opportunistically when they control the liquidation decision — i.e., when there is a lender hold...

Governments in Africa are turning to large-scale partnerships with donors and multinational companies to stimulate investment in agriculture. However, so-called mega agricultural public–private partnerships are by and large unproven and risky, and are likely to skew the benefits of investments towards the privileged and more powerful, while the risks fall on the most vulnerable. Oxfam concludes...

We study the problem of identifying the complete set of pairs of input patterns that can cause different types of hazards to appear at a circuit line. A novel methodology to implicitly identify all possible input configurations is proposed. The technique is based on a systematic derivation of the conditions for the occurrence of static and dynamic hazards at a line, which are subsequently formu...

The study of wildfire has long been important to the residents of Los Angeles County, California. Of particular interest is the risk of a location burning given the time since the location’s last burn. Previous authors have investigated the impact of fuel age on the susceptibility of different areas to burning using techniques which are not optimal in the case where detailed spatial and tempora...

Agro-meteorological index insurance is an innovative agricultural insurance product that has solved problems of conventional agricultural insurances including excessive cost and moral hazard. Agro-meteorological index insurance has become an effective agricultural insurance scheme. This paper primarily uses meteorological data and winter wheat yield data in the Jiangsu Province for the last 35 ...