Partnership Dissolution and Proprietary Information

This paper studies different rules in dissolving a common value partnership where one partner holds proprietary information. In winner's bid auction (WBA) and loser's bid auction (LBA), there exists a unique mixed strategy equilibrium. ``Payoff equivalence'' is established in the sense that partners' expected payoffs are the same under the two auction formats. The informed partner benefits from an information rent while the uninformed suffers from an ``ownership's curse''. When cake-cutting mechanism (CCM) is applied, whether pure strategy equilibrium exists or not depends on the identity of the proposer. If the uninformed partner is the proposer, the informed partner receives an information rent in a pure strategy equilibrium. If the informed partner is the proposer, the asset value is shared equally between the two parties in a mixed strategy equilibrium. The paper then compares the information rents and prices offered for proprietary information by the three rules.partnership dissolution; proprietary information; winner's bid auction; loser's bid auction; cake-cutting mechanism

Efficient Inequity–Averse Teams

This paper analyzes the efficiency of team production when agents exhibit other regarding preferences. It is shown that full efficiency can be sustained as an equilibrium through a budget-balancing mechanism that punishes some randomly chosen agents if output falls short of efficient level but distributes the output equally otherwise, provided that the agents are sufficiently inequity averse

Efficient Inequity–Averse Teams

This paper analyzes the efficiency of team production when agents exhibit other regarding preferences. It is shown that full efficiency can be sustained as an equilibrium through a budget-balancing mechanism that punishes some randomly chosen agents if output falls short of efficient level but distributes the output equally otherwise, provided that the agents are sufficiently inequity averse.moral hazard; team production; inequity aversion

Allocation of Authority when a Person is not a Robot

We formalize a conception of authority, which is commonly defined as the right of controlling a person’s actions embedded in human assets in sociology. Due to the inalienable property of human assets, the contractible formal authority is hard to verify and enforce, while real authority usually diverges from formal authority. Inefficiency tends to arise when a task is not routine or can not be done by a robot. Using a framework of incomplete contract, we show that allocation of formal authority, as an instrument to mitigate the inefficiency, is determined by features of tasks and specificity of assets, and the relationship between the resources. Monitoring is then introduced to fine tune value of delegation.Transaction of human assets; real authority; formal authority; delegation; monitor

Allocation of Authority when a Person is not a Robot

We formalize a conception of authority, which is commonly defined as the right of controlling a person’s actions embedded in human assets in sociology. Due to the inalienable property of human assets, the contractible formal authority is hard to verify and enforce, while real authority usually diverges from formal authority. Inefficiency tends to arise when a task is not routine or can not be done by a robot. Using a framework of incomplete contract, we show that allocation of formal authority, as an instrument to mitigate the inefficiency, is determined by features of tasks and specificity of assets, and the relationship between the resources. Monitoring is then introduced to fine tune value of delegation

Contracting for Infrastructure Projects as Credence Goods

Large infrastructure projects are a major responsibility of government, who usually lacks expertise to fully specify the demanded projects. Contractors, typically experts on such projects, advise of the needed design in their bids. Producing the right design is nevertheless costly. We model the contracting for such infrastructure projects taking into account this credence goods feature and examine the performance of commonly used contracting methods. We show that when building costs are public information, multistage competitive bidding involving shortlisting of two contractors and contingent compensation of both contractors on design efforts outperforms sequential search and the traditional Design-and-Build approach. While the latter leads to minimum design effort, sequential search suffers from a commitment problem. If building costs are the private information of the contractors and are revealed to them after design cost is sunk, competitive bidding may involve sampling more than two contractors. The commitment problem under sequential search may be overcome by the procurer's incentive to search for low building cost if the design cost is sufficiently low. If this is the case, sequential search may outperform competitive bidding.Credence Goods, Design-Build, Competitive Bidding, Sequential Search, Infrastructure Projects

Partnership Dissolution, Complementarity, and Investment Incentives

We study a partnership that anticipates its possible dissolution. In our model, partnerships form in order to take advantage of complementary skills; although new opportunities may arise that make partners’ skills useless. We characterize the optimal, incentive-compatible partnership contract that can be implemented by a simple call option, and then analyze the commonly used buy–sell provision. We show that this dissolution rule gives rise to inefficiency, either in the form of excessive dissolutions combined with underinvestment or efficient dissolutions combined with overinvestment. However, supplementing the buy–sell provision with the right to veto may restore efficiency.

Collective Production and Incentives

We analyse incentive problems in collective production environments where contributors are compensated according to their observed and ranked efforts. This provides incentives to the contributors to choose first best efforts

Collective Production and Incentives

We analyse incentive problems in collective production environments where contributors are compensated according to their observed and ranked efforts. This provides incentives to the contributors to choose first best efforts.

Signaling versus Costly Information Acquisition

In Spence’s (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers’ productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre–employment auditing to learn workers’ productivities. We characterize the trade–offs between signaling by workers and costly information acquisition by firms. Information acquisition is always associated with (partial) pooling of worker types, and education is used as a signal only if relatively few workers have low productivity. Our analysis applies also to other signaling problems, e.g. the financial structure of firms, warranties, and initial public offerings