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We analyze how long-term uncertainty, for example, regarding future climate conditions, affects the design of concession contracts and organizational forms in a principal–agent context, with dynamic moral hazard, limited liability, and irreversibility constraints. The prospect of future, uncertain productivity shocks on the returns on the firm's effort creates an option value of delaying efforts, a course that exacerbates agency costs. Contracts and organizational forms are drafted to control this cost of delegated flexibility. The possibility for the agent to delay investment in response to uncertainty and irreversibility also elicits preference for unbundling different stages of the project through short-term contracts. Our analysis is relevant to infrastructure sectors that are sensitive to changing weather conditions and sheds a pessimistic light on the relevance of public–private partnerships in this context.

We use data from the Italian manufacturing industry to document a positive correlation between delegation and R&D. This result is robust to controlling for the determinants of R&D such as human capital, capital intensity and sectoral or regional effects. We further investigate the determinants of delegation and find that ownership concentration is significantly related to delegation. Among large firms with a dispersed ownership structure, larger ownership concentration implies less delegation, whereas the opposite emerges with more concentrated ownership. Differences between the Northern and Southern regions in terms of firms' propensity to delegate decisions and engage in R&D also emerge.

We analyze the regulation of firms that undertake socially risky activities but can reduce the probability of an accident inflicted on third parties by carrying out non verifiable effort. Congress delegates regulation to an agency, although these two bodies may have different preferences toward the industry. The optimal level of discretion left to the agency results from the following trade-off: the agency can tailor discretionary policies to its expert knowledge about potential harm, but it implements policies that are too "pro-industry." The agency should be given full discretion when the firm is solvent; partial discretion is preferred otherwise. We then investigate how this trade-off changes as the political and economic landscapes are modified.

We analyze licensing contracts between informed innovators and developers exerting profit-increasing effort. Those contracts must simultaneously induce innovators to convey information on the value of their ideas, while inducing developers to exert effort and protecting the innovators' intellectual property rights. We show that the best innovators signal themselves by taking more royalties even if it reduces the developers' share of returns and their incentives. Moreover, royalties are more likely to be used when property rights are easy to enforce and pre-contractual evidence on innovation quality is hard to produce.

We study how competition in nonlinear pricing between two principals (sellers) affects market participation by a privately informed agent (consumer). When participation is restricted to all or nothing (“intrinsic” agency), the agent must choose between both principals' contracts and selecting her outside option. When the agent is afforded the additional possibilities of choosing only one contract (“delegated” agency), competition is more intense. The two games have distinct predictions for participation. Intrinsic agency always induces more distortion in participation relative to the monopoly outcome, and equilibrium allocations are discontinuous for the marginal consumer. Under delegated agency, relative to monopoly, market participation increases (respectively, decreases) when contracting variables are substitutes (respectively, complements) on the intensive margin. Equilibrium allocations are continuous for the marginal consumer and the range of product offerings is identical to both the first-best and the monopoly outcome.

This article analyzes the shape of contracts between local governments and the contractors they hire to run public facilities on their behalf. Governments are privately informed about the quality of the facility while risk neutral contractors undertake a non-verifiable operating eort. The design of the contract signals the quality of the facility in such a way that the better this quality, the greater the share of operating risk kept by the government. This feature reduces the agent’s marginal incentives, creating a trade-o between signaling and moral hazard. We provide extensions of our framework in several directions allowing for risk aversion on the agent’s side, double moral hazard and political delegation. The model is supported by some stylized facts from the water industry.

We analyze a public good problem when agents form a grand coalition to promote their own collective goal instead of that of society as a whole. When collusion takes place under symmetric information, the collusion-proof Samuelson rule takes a simple form that is close to an ex ante cost-benefit analysis. Then, we analyze the case where agents collude under asymmetric information. First, we describe the set of collusion-proof allocations. Second, we establish the collusion-proof Samuelson rule that highlights the role of coalitional virtual valuations. Asymmetric information within the coalition allows the principal to recover some flexibility in the design of the optimal policy. We finally discuss the nature of the inefficiency created by the agents' collusive behavior and the scope of their ex ante gain in forming a coalition.

The firm is often considered as a nexus of contracts linking the management and its different stakeholders: claim-holders, workers, unions, customers, suppliers, and the state, among others. This paper surveys recent work in contract theory, the multiprincipal incentive theory, and the theory of side contracts, which provides some insights into the structure of those contracts and therefore into the structure of the firm. First, we discuss the incomplete contracting assumptions underlying these variations of the usual grand contract approach. Second, we explain how the theoretical lessons learned from this work—the distribution of contracting rights, the power of incentive schemes within organizations, and the design of communication channels—apply to the theory of the firm.

We show that the separation of powers in regulation may act as a commitment against the threat of regulatory capture. Splitting regulatory tasks and monitoring technologies among several nonbenevolent regulators may reduce their discretion in engaging in socially wasteful activities. When regulators make collusive offers that are accepted by the agent whatever his characteristics, competition between regulators relaxes collusion-proofness constraints and improves social welfare. This result is robust to different specifications of the agent's preferences and to the timing of the game as long as one insists on safe side-contracting offers. We also discuss how separation affects both allocative efficiency and the distribution of rents in the economy.

We discuss the internal organization of the firm, arguing that the comparison between a centralized and a decentralized hierarchical organization should be cast in terms of the agency costs associated with the different side-contracting games that agents play in these organizations. In our model, with no limits on communication between the agents and the principal (complete contracting), collusion is not an issue in a centralized organization. Centralization always dominates (at least weakly) delegation. With limits on communication (incomplete contracting), collusion may have some bite under centralization. Limits on communication introduce an anonymity condition on the contract, creating a conflict between participation and coalition incentive constraints under centralization. By shifting the bargaining power in the side-contracting stage, delegation is nonanonymous and asymmetric by design. This conflict is then avoided or diminished depending on the exact timing of the delegation game.