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Working Paper
Can Reputation Discipline the Gig Economy? Experimental Evidence from an Online Labor Market
Just as employers face uncertainty when hiring workers, workers also face uncertainty when accepting employment, and bad employers may opportunistically depart from expectations, norms, and laws. However, prior research in economics and information sciences has focused sharply on the employer?s problem of identifying good workers rather than vice versa. This issue is especially pronounced in markets for gig work, including online labor markets, where platforms are developing strategies to help workers identify good employers. We build a theoretical model for the value of such reputation ...
Working Paper
Netting, financial contracts, and banks: the economic implications
Derivatives and certain other off-balance sheet contracts enjoy special legal protection on insolvent counterparties through a process referred to as 'close-out netting.' This paper explores the legal status and economic implications of this protection. While this protection benefits major derivatives dealers and derivatives markets, it is less clear that other market participants or markets in general are better or worse off. While we are not able to conclude whether or not these protections are socially optimal, we outline the wide range of issues that a general consideration of the pros ...
Working Paper
Inducing agents to report hidden trades: a theory of an intermediary
When contracts are unobserved, agents may have the incentive to promise the same asset to multiple counterparties and subsequently default. The author constructs an optimal mechanism that induces agents to reveal all their trades voluntarily. The mechanism allows agents to report every contract they enter, and it makes public the names of agents who have reached some prespecified position limit. In some cases, an agent's position limit must be higher than the number of contracts he enters in equilibrium. The mechanism has some features of a clearinghouse. ; Supersedes Working Paper 09-10
Working Paper
Contracts with social multipliers
We develop a model of contracting in which individual effort choices are subject to social pressure to conform to the average effort level of others in the same risk-sharing group. As in related models of social interactions, a change in exogenous variables or contract terms generates a social multiplier. In this environment, small differences in fundamentals such as skill or effort cost can lead to large differences in group productivity. We characterize the optimal contract for this environment and describe the properties of equilibria, properties that agree with stylized facts on effort ...
Working Paper
Moral hazard in the Diamond-Dybvig model of banking
We modify the Diamond-Dybvig model studied in Green and Lin to incorporate a self-interested banker who has a private record-keeping technology. A public record-keeping device does not exist. We find that there is a trade-off between sophisticated contracts that possess relatively good risk-sharing properties but allocate resources inefficiently for incentive reasons, and simple contracts that possess relatively poor risk-sharing properties but economize on the inefficient use of resources. While this trade-off depends on model parameters, we find that simple contracts prevail under a wide ...
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A recursive formulation for repeated agency with history dependence
There is now an extensive literature regarding the efficient design of incentive mechanisms in dynamic environments. In this literature, there are no exogenous links across time periods because either privately observed shocks are assumed time independent or past private actions have no influence on the realizations of current variables. The absence of exogenous links across time periods ensures that preferences over continuation contracts are common knowledge, making the definition of incentive compatible contracts at a point in time a simple matter. In this paper, we present general ...
Working Paper
Investment and Bilateral Insurance
Private information may limit insurance possibilities when two agents get together to pool idiosyncratic risk. However, if there is capital accumulation, bilateral insurance possibilities may improve because misreporting distorts investment. We show that if one of the Pareto weights is sufficiently large, that agent does not have incentives to misreport. This implies that, under some conditions, the full information allocation is incentive compatible when agents have equal Pareto weights. In the long run, either one of the agents goes to immiseration, or both agents’ lifetime utilities are ...
Working Paper
Mortgages as recursive contracts
Mortgages are one-sided contracts under which the borrower may terminate the contract at any time, while the lender must commit to honoring the terms of the contract throughout its life. There are two aspects to this feature of the contract that are modeled in this paper. The first is that the borrower may choose between buying a house or renting. Given these alternatives, a contract between a household and a lender makes home ownership feasible, and provides insurance to the household against fluctuating rental payments. The second is that once in a contract, the household may terminate the ...
Report
Tax buyouts
The paper studies a fiscal policy instrument that can reduce fiscal distortions, without affecting revenues, in a politically viable way. The instrument is a private contract (tax buyout), offered by the government to each individual citizen, whereby the citizen can choose to pay a fixed price up front in exchange for a given reduction in her tax rate for a prespecified period of time. We consider a dynamic overlapping-generations economy, calibrated to match several features of the U.S. income and wealth distribution, and show that, under simple pricing, the introduction of the buyout is ...
Working Paper
Contracting innovations and the evolution of clearing and settlement methods at futures exchanges
Defining futures contracts as substitutes for associated cash transactions enables a discussion of the evolution of controls over contract nonperformance risk. These controls are incorporated into exchange methods for clearing contracts. Three clearing methods are discussed: direct, ringing and complete. The incidence and operation of each are described. Direct-clearing systems feature bilateral contracts with terms specified by the counterparties to the contract. Exchanges relying on direct clearing system chiefly serve as mediators in trade disputes. Ringing is shown to facilitate contract ...