Procurement in infrastructure : what does theory tell us ?

Infrastructure has particular challenges in public procurement, because it is highly complex and customized and often requires economic, political and social considerations from a long time horizon. To deliver public infrastructure services to citizens or taxpayers, there are a series of decisions that governments have to make. The paper provides a minimum package of important economic theories that could guide governments to wise decision-making at each stage. Theory suggests that in general it would be a good option to contract out infrastructure to the private sector under high-powered incentive mechanisms, such as fixed-price contracts. However, this holds under certain conditions. Theory also shows that ownership should be aligned with the ultimate responsibility for or objective of infrastructure provision. Public and private ownership have different advantages and can deal with different problems. It is also shown that it would be a better option to integrate more than one public task (for example, investment and operation) into the same ownership, whether public or private, if they exhibit positive externalities.Public Sector Economics&Finance,Debt Markets,Infrastructure Economics,Contract Law,Transport Economics Policy&Planning

What do economists tell us about venture capital contracts?

Venture capital markets are characterized by multiple incentive problems and asymmetric information in an uncertain environment. All kinds of agency problems are present: moral hazard, adverse selection, hold-up problems, window dressing, etc. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists enter into contracts that influence their behavior and mitigate the agency costs. In particular, they select an appropriate kind and structure of financing and specify the rights as well as the duties of both parties. The typical features of venture capital investments are: an intensive screening and evaluation process, an active involvement of venture capitalists in their portfolio companies, a staging of capital infusions, the use of special financing instruments such as convertible debt or convertible preferred stock, syndication among venture capitalists, or a short investment horizon. --Venture Capital,Agency Costs

What Do Economists Tell Us about Venture Capital Contracts?

Venture capital markets are characterized by multiple incentive problems and asymmetric information in an uncertain environment. All kinds of agency problems are present: moral hazard, adverse selection, hold-up problems, window dressing, etc. Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists enter into contracts that influence their behavior and mitigate the agency costs. In particular, they select an appropriate kind and structure of financing and specify the rights as well as the duties of both parties. The typical features of venture capital investments are: an intensive screening and evaluation process, an active involvement of venture capitalists in their portfolio companies, a staging of capital infusions, the use of special financing instruments such as convertible debt or convertible preferred stock, syndication among venture capitalists, or a short investment horizon

The Law and Economics of Contracts

This paper, which will appear as a chapter in the forthcoming Handbook of Law and Economics (A.M. Polinsky & S. Shavell, eds.), surveys major issues arising in the economic analysis of contract law. It begins with an introductory discussion of scope and methodology, and then addresses four topic areas that correspond to the major doctrinal divisions of the law of contracts. These areas include freedom of contract (i.e., the scope of private power to create binding obligations), formation of contracts (both the procedural mechanics of exchange, and rules that govern pre-contractual behavior), contract interpretation (what consequences follow when agreements are ambiguous or incomplete), and enforcement of contractual obligations. For each of these sections, we address the economic analysis of particular legal rules and institutions, and, where relevant, connections between legal arrangements and associated topics in microeconomic theory, including welfare economics and the theory of contracts

Dynamic Adverse Selection and the Supply Size

In this paper we examine the problem of dynamic adverse selection in a stylized market where the quality of goods is a seller’s private information while the realized distribution of qualities is public information. We show that in equilibrium all goods can be traded if the size of the supply is publicly available to market participants. Moreover, we show that if exchanges can take place frequently enough, then agents roughly enjoy the entire potential surplus from exchanges. We illustrate these findings with a dynamic model of trade where buyers and sellers repeatedly interact over time. We also identify circumstances under which only full trade equilibria exist. Further, we give conditions for full trade to obtain when the realized distribution of qualities is not public information and when new goods enter the market at later stages

Dynamic Adverse Selection and the Supply Size

In this paper we examine the problem of dynamic adverse selection in a stylized market where the quality of goods is a seller’s private information while the realized distribution of qualities is public information. We show that in equilibrium all goods can be traded if the size of the supply is publicly available to market participants. Moreover, we show that if exchanges can take place frequently enough, then agents roughly enjoy the entire potential surplus from exchanges. We illustrate these findings with a dynamic model of trade where buyers and sellers repeatedly interact over time. We also identify circumstances under which only full trade equilibria exist. Further, we give conditions for full trade to obtain when the realized distribution of qualities is not public information and when new goods enter the market at later stages

Essays on relational contracts

This dissertation contains three essays on self-enforcing implicit contracts in economic transactions and politics. Chapter 2 studies a repeated agency model with two tasks where the agent has private information on the first task and there is no verifiable performance signal for the second task. The equilibrium level of the first task is determined so as to guarantee the credibility of the relational contracts to provide incentives for the second task. It implies interesting economic results including non-monotonic relation between the discount factor and the total surplus, social desirability of unverifiability, and implications for organization design. Chapter 3 studies a model of political contribution of dynamic common agency where state-contingent agreements must be self-enforced. First, we investigate the punishment strategy for supporting the self-enforcing mechanism. The most severe punishment strategy on the principals takes the form of a two-phase scheme in general. Second, we characterize the payoff set of the equilibria on which the same decision is chosen by the agent through implicit agreements and examine whether it can achieve the same payoff as in the standard static menu auction model. It implies that there could be an equilibrium outcome in a static menu auction that cannot be supported in our model for any discount factor. Chapter 4 studies repeated political competition with policy-motivated citizen candidates. The dynamic relationship could cause strategic candidacy in two-candidate competition, such as in circumstances where two candidates stand for election and one of them has no chance to win. The candidate can choose her implementing policy depending on the set of the rival candidates in the election and the rival candidate actually has an incentive to stand even with no chance to win since it can induce policy compromises from the winning candidate