Working Papers

Abstract:  We study a moral hazard problem with adverse selection: a risk-neutral agent can directly control the output distribution and possess private information about the production environment. The principal designs a menu of contracts satisfying limited liability. Deviating from classical models, not only can the principal motivate the agent to exert certain levels of aggregate efforts by designing the "power" of the contracts, but she can also regulate the support of the chosen output distributions by designing the "range" of the contract. We show that it is either optimal for the principal to provide a single full-range contract, or the optimal low-type contract range excludes some high outputs, or the optimal high-type contract range excludes some low outputs. We provide sufficient and necessary conditions on when a single full-range contract is optimal under convex effort functions, and show that this condition is also sufficient with general effort functions.

Abstract:  This paper examines cost allocation rules for minimum cost spanning tree (MCST) problems, focusing on the properties of merge-proofness and coalitional stability. Merge-proofness ensures that no coalition of agents has the incentive to merge before participating in the cost allocation process. On the other hand, coalitional stability ensures that no coalition has the incentive to withdraw from the cost allocation process after the cost allocation proposal is made. We propose a novel class of rules called induced rules, which are derived recursively from base rules designed for two-person MCST problems. We demonstrate that induced rules exhibit both merge-proofness and coalitional stability within a restricted domain, provided that the corresponding base rules satisfy specific conditions.