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A substantial literature has been devoted to analyzing how legislators delegate regulatory power to a more knowledgeable agency. Yet, much less attention has been paid to understand how this delegation process is shaped by the environment in which this agency operates, and more specifically by the actions of interest groups. We propose a model of regulatory capture to assess how the distribution of information across interest groups and agencies impacts optimal delegation. Whether an interest group and his agency share information or not determines the scope for capture and how much discretion should be left to this agency in response. Whether asymmetric information reduces or increases discretion depends on the biases of the group and the agency vis-à-vis Congress. Groups that are more aligned with Congress collect politically relevant information, while more extreme groups remain poorly informed. The information structure that endogenously emerges increases discretion under broad circumstances.

We present a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a class of optimal control problems with pure state constraints for which the objective function is linear in the state variable but the objective function is only required to be upper semicontinuous in the control variable. We apply those conditions to economic environments in contract theory where discontinuities in objectives prevail. Examples of applications include nonlinear pricing of digital goods and nonlinear pricing under competitive threat.

A la lumiere de la theorie des incitations, l’Etat est ici envisage comme un nœud de contrats entre le citoyen, le politique, le bureaucrate et la sphere economique. Or le caractere incomplet de ces contrats structure les formes prises par l’action publique. Cet essai montre comment le lien entre le citoyen et le politique s’en trouve delite et, par la meme, l’implication democratique du premier menacee.

Empirical evidence suggests that consumers facing complex nonlinear prices often make choices based on average (not marginal) prices. Given such behavior, we characterize a monopolist’s optimal nonlinear price schedule. In contrast to the textbook setting, nonlinear prices designed for “ average-price bias” distort consumption downward for consumers with the highest marginal utility and typically feature quantity premia rather than quantity discounts. These properties arise because the bias replaces consumer information rents with “curvature rents.” Whether or not a monopolist prefers consumers with average-price bias depends upon underlying preferences and costs. (JEL D11, D21, D42, L12)

International audience; Two conflicting interest groups buy favor from a policy maker. Influence is modeled as a common-agency game with lobbyists proposing monetary contributions contingent on decisions. When the preferences of the group members are common knowledge, groups form efficiently and lobbying competition perfectly aggregates preferences. When those preferences are instead private information, free riding in collective action arises within groups. Free riding implies that the influence of a group is weakened and that lobbying competition imperfectly aggregates preferences. By softening lobbying competition, private information might also increase groups’ payoffs and hurt the policy maker. Importantly, the magnitudes of informational frictions within each group are jointly determined at equilibrium. We draw from these findings a number of implications for the organization of interest groups.

International audience; An incumbent seller contracts with a buyer and faces the threat of entry. The contract stipulates a price and a penalty for breach if the buyer later switches to the entrant. Sellers are heterogenous in terms of the gross surplus they provide to the buyer. The buyer is privately informed on her valuation for the incumbent's service. Asymmetric information makes the incumbent favor entry as it helps screening buyers. When the entrant has some bargaining power vis-à-vis the buyer and keeps a share of the gains from entry, the incumbent instead wants to reduce entry. The compounding effect of these two forces may lead to either excessive entry or foreclosure, and possibly to a fixed rebate for exclusivity given to all buyers.

The paper addresses the issue of the feasible level of private finance in a contracting model of infrastructure finding and financing. It characterizes the structure of financial contracts, deriving the conditions under which both public and private finance coexist. A key feature is that access to outside finance and the regulatory decision on pricing and the amount of public subsidy, hence the extent of price recovery, are jointly determined. Mobilizing private finance requires a combination of price for the service and subsidy to the service provider that is large enough, exacerbating the fundamental tensions between financial viability through cost recovery and social inclusion. The paper then shows that the feasibility trade-off responds in non-trivial ways to changes in the economic and institutional environment likely to occur along the development path. While improvements along some of these dimensions, notably in the efficiency of bankruptcy procedures, appear to ease access to private finance, others, such as the cost of public funds, actually makes public finance more efficient. Using project data from the PPI database including information on the financial structure, the authors uncover an inverse U-shaped pattern in the share of private finance, peaking for countries in the upper-middle income range, which echoes their theoretical findings.

International audience; A monopoly seller advising buyers about which of two goods fits their needs may be tempted to recommend the higher margin good. For the seller to collect information about a buyer’s needs and provide truthful advice, the profits from selling both goods must be similar enough, i.e., within an implementability cone. The optimal regulation controls pricing distortions and information‐collection incentives separately via price regulation and fixed rewards respectively. This no longer holds when the seller has private information about costs as both problems interact. We study whether competition and the threat by buyers to switch sellers can substitute for regulation.

International audience; Motivated by a recent merger proposal in the French outdoor advertising market, we develop a model in which firms are initially endowed with some advertising capacities and compete on two fronts. First, firms compete to acquire additional advertising capacities on an upstream market; a first stage modeled as a second-price auction with externalities. Second, those firms, privately informed on their own costs, use their capacities on the downstream market to supply advertisers whose demand is random; a second stage modeled by means of mechanism design techniques. We study the linkages between the equilibrium outcomes on both markets. When a firm is endowed with more initial capacity, through the acquisition of a competitor for instance, whether it becomes more or less eager to acquire extra capacity on the upstream market depends a priori on fine details of the downstream market. Under reasonable choices of functional forms, we demonstrate that a downstream merger does not create any bias in the upstream market towards the already dominant firm. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

We consider a general equilibrium model of international trade with two layers of informational asymmetries. Private information of Home producers on costs affects the design of ‘behind-the-border’ policies reflecting the political influence of inefficient producers. Home's supply is contracted, causing trade, and motivating the use of tariffs. Eliminating those instruments by means of a trade agreement may become impossible once Home has also private information on its redistributive concerns. Home, when subject to strong influence by inefficient producers, might be reluctant to adopt free trade, which may lead to limited tariff cuts and give a role for export subsidies.

International audience; We consider the regulation of the tariffs charged by a public utility in the electricity sector. Consumers differ in terms of their privately known demands. When regulating a firm's tariffs, the government is concerned by the redistribution across consumer classes. A conflict between redistribution and screening induces pricing distortions when the firm is a monopoly. Introducing competition with an unregulated fringe improves efficiency but jeopardizes redistribution. In response to this problem, the government may now want to manipulate information about the incumbent's cost to restrict entry and better promote its own redistributive objective. To prevent such obstacle to entry, the government's discretion in fixing the incumbent's regulated tariffs should be restricted by imposing floors or caps on those tariffs and/or by controlling the market share left to the competitive fringe. We highlight the determinants of such limits on discretion and unveil to what extent they depend on the government's redistributive concerns.

Consider strategic risk-neutral traders competing in schedules to supply liquidity to a risk-averse agent who is privately informed about the value of the asset and his hedging needs. Imperfect competition in this common value environment is analyzed as a multi-principal game in which liquidity suppliers offer trading mechanisms in a decentralized way. Each liquidity supplier behaves as a monopolist facing a residual demand curve resulting from the maximizing behavior of the informed agent and the trading mechanisms offered by his competitors. There exists a unique equilibrium in convex schedules. It is symmetric and differentiable and exhibits typical features of market-power: Equilibrium trading volume is lower than ex ante efficiency would require. Liquidity suppliers charge positive mark-ups and make positive expected profits, but these profits decrease with the number of competitors. In the limit, as this number goes to infinity, ask (resp. bid) prices converge towards the upper (resp. lower) tail expectations obtained in Glosten (1994) and expected profits are zero.

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.

L’objet de cet article est de remettre en question la vision optimiste du jeu politique entre groupes de pression qui est offerte par la theorie de l’agence commune. Si l’on croit les lecons de cette theorie, le processus de concurrence entre groupes de pression conduit a des choix equilibres ; une vision associee au mouvement du pluralistic politics dont l’etendard fut porte par Dahl [1963]. Si le paradigme de l’agence commune est renouvele par la prise en consideration des problemes informationnels a l’interieur des groupes d’interet ou entre ces derniers et le decideur politique, les inefficacites organisationnelles auxquelles font face les groupes diffusent dans tout le processus politique qui, lui aussi, finit par etre inefficace. Cet article decrit le type de couts de transaction qui pesent alors sur ce processus.

We characterize the optimal extraction path when a concessionaire has private information on the initial stock of resource. Under asymmetric information, a `virtual Hotelling rule' describes how the resource price evolves over time and how extraction costs are compounded with information costs along an optimal extraction path. In sharp contrast with the case of complete information, elds which are heterogeneous in terms of their initial stocks follow di erent extraction paths. Some resource might be left unexploited in the long-run as a way to foster incentives. The optimal contract may sometimes be implemented through royalties and license fees. With a market of concessionaires, asymmetric information leads to a `virtual Her ndahl principle' and to a new form of heterogeneity across active concessionaires. Under asymmetric information, the market price converges faster to its long-run limit, exhibiting more stability.

The paper addresses the issue of the feasible level of private finance in a contract- ing model of infrastructure funding and financing. It characterizes the structure of financial contracts, deriving the conditions under which both public and private finance coexist. A key feature is that access to outside finance and the regulatory decision on pricing and the amount of public subsidy, hence the extent of price recovery, are jointly determined. Mobilizing private finance requires a combination of price for the service and subsidy to the service provider that is large enough, exacerbating the fundamental tension between financial viability through cost recovery and social inclusion. The paper then shows that the feasibility trade-off responds in non-trivial ways to changes in the economic and institutional environment likely to occur along the development path. While improvements along some of these dimensions, notably in the efficiency of bankruptcy procedures, appear to ease access to private finance, others, such as the cost of public funds, actually makes public finance more efficient. Using project data from the PPI database including information on the financial structure, we uncover an inverse U-shaped pattern in the share of private finance, peaking for countries in the upper-middle income range, which echoes our theoretical findings.

We take a mechanism design perspective to investigate how environmental agreements should account for multilateral externalities, incentive compatibility, and voluntary participation by sovereign countries. The optimal mechanism involves a tradeoff between a free rider problem in the effort provision of participating countries and the necessity of inducing countries to ratify the agreement. This mechanism can be approximated by a simple menu with attractive implementation and robustness properties. Limits on enforcement and commitment might nevertheless hinder the performance of this menu, making the “business as usual” scenario more likely.

Oliver Hart et Bengt Holmstrom ont recu le Prix de la Banque de Suede en sciences economiques en memoire d’Alfred Nobel pour leurs contributions a la Theorie des Contrats. Leurs travaux etablissent une Theorie de la Firme et des organisations fondee sur deux piliers. (1) Les parties contractantes exercent des efforts ou accomplissent des investissements qui accroissent la valeur de leur relation, mais ces actions sont parfois cachees, ne peuvent etre directement observees, et ne peuvent donc pas etre specifiees dans des contrats mise en œuvre par des cours de justice. (2) Les contrats et les structures de proprietes sont des reponses (imparfaites) a ces frictions informationnelles. Les contributions de ces auteurs ont ainsi conjointement ouvert la voie a un renouvellement complet de la Theorie de la Firme et de la Theorie des Organisations.

International audience; We characterize the complete set of equilibrium allocations to an intrinsic common agency screening game as the set of solutions to self-generating optimization programs. We provide a complete characterization of equilibrium outcomes for regular environments by relying on techniques developed elsewhere for aggregate games and for the mechanism design delegation literature. The set of equilibria include those with non-differentiable payoffs and discontinuous choices, as well as equilibria that are smooth and continuous in types. We identify one equilibrium, the maximal equilibrium, which is the unique solution to a self-generating optimization program with the largest (or ``maximal'') domain, and the only equilibrium that is supported with bi-conjugate (i.e., least-concave) tariffs. The maximal equilibrium exhibits a n-fold distortion caused by each of the n principal's non-cooperative behavior in over-harvesting the agent's information rent. Furthermore, in any equilibrium, over any interval of types in which there is full separation, the agent's equilibrium action corresponds to the allocation in the maximal equilibrium. Under reasonable conditions, the maximal equilibrium maximizes the agent's information rent within the class of equilibrium allocations. When the principals' most-preferred equilibrium allocation differs from the maximal equilibrium, we demonstrate that the agent's choice function exhibits an interval of bunching over the worst agent types, and elsewhere corresponds with the maximal allocation. The optimal region of bunching trades off the principals' desire to constrain inefficient n-fold marginalizations of the agent's rent against the inefficiency of pooling agent types.

International audience; We characterize the optimal contract for resource extraction in a context where the concessionaire has private information on the initial stock of resource. The dynamics of extraction is characterized by a virtual Hotelling rule in which costs of extraction are replaced with virtual costs of extraction. We analyze how structural breaks in the price of resource impact the dynamics of extraction.

International audience; We consider an infinitely-repeated principal–agent relationship run with stationary contracts. The agent has private information on his persistent cost parameter and, under limited enforcement, both parties can breach the contract. The optimal stationary contract with limited enforcement is made of two distinct pieces. For the most efficient types of the agent, the contract entails bunching with a fixed payment and a fixed output. For less efficient types, the contract exhibits downward output distortions below the Baron–Myerson level that would have been achieved had enforcement been costless.

Nos societes sont confrontees a d’immenses defis dans la gestion des risques auxquels elles font face. La gamme des nouveaux risques induits par les incessants progres de la science et de la technologie, comme l’etendue potentielle des dangers qu’ils engendrent, n’ont jamais paru aussi vastes. L’evaluation des consequences du changement climatique, l’estimation des risques nucleaires, industriels ou sanitaires, ou la regulation des grands flux financiers exigent aujourd’hui de mieux comprendr...

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.