Resale Price Maintenance under Asymmetric Information

We study Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) in a successive monopolies framework with adverse selection and moral hazard. The analysis compares both the private and the wel- fare properties of vertical contracts based on retail price restrictions with those derived under quantity .xing arrangements (QF). With information asymmetries, both types of vertical contracts entail a double marginalization driven by the presence of information rents, distributed to a privately informed downstream retailer, which forces the upstream producer to sell above its marginal costs. When .rms behave non-cooperatively, the up- stream producer always prefers RPM to QF, and the impact of RPM on consumers. surplus is ambiguous. With joint-pro.ts maximizing contracts, instead, whenever RPM maximizes constrained joint-pro.ts it also raises consumers.surplus, thereby producing a Pareto improvement relative to QF contracts.

The Theory of Incentives Applied to the Transport Sector

Building upon Iossa and Martimort (2008), we study the main incentive issues and the form of optimal contracts for Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in transports. We present a basic model of procurement in a multitask environment in which a risk-averse firm chooses unobservable efforts in infrastructure and service quality. We begin by analyzing the effect on incentives and risk transfer of bunding building and operation into a single contract. We consider the factors that affect the optimal allocation of demand risk and their implications for the choice of contract length. We discuss the dynamics of PPP contracts and how the risk of regulatory opportunism affects design and incentives.

Multidimensional communication mechanisms: cooperative and conflicting designs

This paper investigates optimal communication mechanisms with a two-dimensional policy space and no monetary transfers. Contrary to the one-dimensional setting, when a single principal controls two activities undertaken by his agent (cooperative design), the optimal communication mechanism never exhibits any pooling and the agent's ideal policies are never chosen. However, when the conflicts of interests between the agent and the principal on each dimension of the agent's activity are close to each other, simpler mechanisms that generalize those optimal in the one-dimensional case perform quite well. These simple mechanisms exhibit much pooling. When each activity of the agent is controlled by a different principal (non-cooperative design) and enters separately into the agent's utility function, optimal mechanisms under private communication take again the form of simple delegation sets, exactly as in the one-dimensional case. When instead the agent finds some benefits in coordinating actions, a one-sided contractual externality arises between principals under private communication. Under public communication instead, there does not exist any pure strategy Nash equilibrium with continuous and piecewise differentiable communication mechanisms. Relaxing the commitment ability of the principals restores equilibrium existence under public communication and yields partitional equilibria. Compared with private communication, public communication generates discipline or subversion effects among principals depending on the profile of their respective biases with respect to the agent's ideal policies.communication ; delegation ; mechanism design ; multi-dimensional decision ; common agency

Communication by Interest Groups and the Organization of Lobbying

This paper uses a mechanism design approach to characterize the optimal organization of lobbying groups in a political context where those groups have private information on their ideal points in a one-dimensional policy space. First, we derive the optimal mechanism for one single group and show that it depends on the confict of interests between his own preferences and those of the policy-maker but also on how informative the distribution of the interest group's ideal point is. We then extend the analysis to the case of multiple nterest groups. Although dealing with a coalition of those groups allows the policy-maker to benefit from a more precise information (an informativeness effect), the optimal organization may nevertheless call for a decentralized mechanism where groups compete because this is the only way to transmit information on the relative strength of their preferences (a screening effect). A coalition of interest groups dominates for small values of the confict of interests whereas competing interest groups emerge for greater values.