Providing Long-term Care without Crowding-out Family Support and Private Insurance

In this paper we are interested in the organization of long-term care within a given population. Three care financers are identified: the family, the government and the care receiver who can buy a dependency insurance. Our interest lies in the effect of governmental intervention on the demand/supply of these three forms of LTC i.e. how state intervention affects the provision of LTC by the market and the family. Knowing that, we search for an efficient organization of LTC.

Optimal Monitoring in Teams

This paper investigates the role of output quality control in a multi agent setting with moral hazard. The principal is in charge of a team of agents who produce the output. The marketing of this output can be either a success or entail huge losses. At the time of marketing the product, the principal is uncertain about its quality and can only observe an imperfect signal of it. This creates an ex post inefficiency (a successful project may not be undertaken) and a room for monitoring output's quality. In the paper, we describe when the principal will pay for this costly monitoring and its effect on agents' incentives to exert effort. We show that there are distortions ex ante in the contract offered by the principal and ex post in the continuation decision. The monitoring can only ensure ex post efficiency. The ex ante efficiency requires effort observability.Team; principal agent; monitoring

Common and Separate Ownership of Projects

This note points out the differences between conducting several projects within one big firm (common ownership) and conducting each project within an independent firm (separate ownership).Conglomerate, Nature of the firm, Market Vs hierarchies

Regulation under Wealth Constraints

This article studies the problem of regulating a monopolist with unknown marginal cost. The problem described differs from Baron and Myerson [1982] because we suppose that the regulator faces a cash-in-advance constraint. The introduction of such a constraint may lead to the collapse of the incentive system.Regulation; asymmetric information; monopolist

Regulation under Financial Constraints

This article studies the problem of regulating a monopolist with unknown marginal cost. The originality of the paper is to consider that the regulator faces a cash-in-advance constraint. The introduction of such a constraint not only reduces the amount of public good provided but also limits the instruments available to the regulator. The wealth constraint could change the optimal regulatory contract from a two-part tariff, where the quantities produced depend on the firm's cost, to a fixed fee where the firm produces the same quantity whatever its cost.Regulation, Asymmetric information, Monopolist

Delegation and Information Revelation

This paper addresses the question of delegation in a principal-agent setting with asymmetric information. If the person who has the power to act, the principal, doesn't have the necessary information to make the best possible decision, she can address herself to someone, the agent, who has this information. Such delegation of authority has its drawbacks given that the agent may not implement the principal's ideal decision. Delegation is costly for the principal. This cost is called the loss of control. But delegation has also its benefits. We show that delegation is useful to reduce the initial asymmetry of information between the principal and the agent. The benefits of delegation are linked to the information transmitted by the agent to the principal. To show this, we model an organization composed of one principal and one agent. The organization should take a sequence of decisions that are affected by a common environemental parameter. We assume that there is an initial asymmetry of information between the principal and the subordinate agent: the agent knows the state of the world while the principal has only some prior about its distribution. Moreover, we assume that the principal cannot use revelation techniques la Baron Myerson to elicit agent's superior information. In contrast, we adopt an incomplete contract framework and posit that the decision and the state of the world parameter cannot be contracted for. Therefore, the remaining contracting variable is the allocation of decision rights. With these simple contracts, we study how the agent's decision can signal his information to the principal. When the agent is in charge of a decision, his decision signals his information to the principal. The trade off between information transmitted through decisions under delegation and the associated loss of control is the heart of our analysis.

Delegation and Organizational Design

This paper concentrates on the question of organizational design under asymmetric information. The design of the organization has two parts: first, communication channels between the members should be established and second, the tasks should be allocated to the party that performs it in the most efficient way. We show that if the decisions are delegated to the agents, the agent's decisions reveal the information they have to the principal. Delegation is then a mechanism to transfer information. Given that delegation is costly, the principal should decide how many decisions she delegates. In this paper, we show that delegation is only partial. The agents do not receive power over all decisions and some agents may receive power will the other will not even if they are identical.Delagation;Hierarchy;Assymmetric information

What do internal capital markets do ? Redistribution vs. incentives

In this paper we explain the apparent "diversification discount” of conglomerates without assuming inefficient-cross subsidisation through internal capital markets. Instead we assume that internal capital market efficiently redistributes scare resources across a conglomerate’s divisions between sucessive production periods. The need for redistribution arises from the fact that resources may sometimes be produced by divisions which happen to be successful in an earlier production stage but which do not have the best investment opportunities in future production stages. In contrast to the existing literature we consider explicitly the incentive problem between corporate headquater and divisional managers using a standard Moral-Hazard framework. We show that although a complete incentive contract can be written bi-laterally between headquarter and divisional managers, the redistribution of resources across divisions creates additional agency costs in a conglomerate. Moreover, assuming that no complete contract can govern the interim redistribution policy by the headquarter, we show how the agency problem with divisional managers constrains headquarters interim redistribution to be ex ante inefficient.

Competitively neutral universal service obligations

Universal service obligations impose specific costs on the universal service provider. The measure of these costs and their financing have been studied along two complementary lines of reasoning: is the universal service obligation sustainable? Who should bear its costs? Most often, a two-step procedure is put forward. In a first step the cost of USO must be assessed; in a second step the USP must be compensated for this cost. In this paper we argue that this procedure is most often problematic because the implementation of the compensation scheme directly affects the effective cost of USO. We therefore put forward an alternative approach to this problem which does not rely on this two-step procedure and fully acknowledges the distortions that result from the compensation mechanism.universal service obligations, cost-sharing mechanism, competitive neutrality

Delegation, Externalities and Organizational Design

In a repeated interaction between and a principal and two agents with inter-agents externalities and asymmetric information, we show that optimal decentralization within the organization is limited to the first period and across agents.