Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

If the allocations of a differential information economy are defined as incentive compatible state-contingent lotteries over consumption goods, competitive equilibrium allocations exist and belong to the (ex ante incentive) core. Furthermore, any competitive equilibrium allocation can be viewed as an element of the core of the n-fold replicated economy, for every n. The converse holds under the further assumption of independent private values but not in general, as shown by a counter-example.

Areplica theorem is shown to hold for exchange economies with asymmetric information. In a replicated exchange economy with asymmetric information the set of all core elements with equal treatment is nonempty, but it is in general only a subset of the core. Nevertheless, the replica theorem and the presence of at least one core element with equal treatment suffice to show existence of a competitive quasi-equilibrium. Conditions on the initial endowments and the communication system are given to ensure that every competitive quasi-equilibrium is a competitive equilibrium.

We analyze the coarse, the fine, and the private core allocation of an exchange economy with differential information. The basic questions that we address are whether the above concepts are: (i) coalitionally incentive compatible, i.e., does truthful revelation of information in each coalition occur; and (ii) taking into account the information superiority or information advantage of an agent. Moreover, the above three concepts are examined in the presence of externalities and a comparison and interpretation of all of three core notions is provided.

We introduce several efficiency notions depending on what kind of expected utility is used (ex ante, interim, ex post) and on how agents share their private information, , whether they redistribute their initial endowments based on their own private information, or common knowledge information, or pooled information. Moreover, we introduce several Bayesian incentive compatibility notions and identify several efficiency concepts which maintain (coalitional) Bayesian incentive compatibility.

This paper examines the core of a pure exchange economy with asymmetric information in which state-dependent allocations are required to satisfy incentive compatibility. This restriction on players’ strategies in the cooperative game can be interpreted as incomplete contracts or partial commitment. An example is provided in which the incentive compatible core with nontransferable utility is empty; the game fails to be balanced because convex combinations of incentive compatible net trades can violate incentive compatibility. However, randomization of such strategies leads to allocations which satisfy incentive compatibility and are feasible on average. Hence, convexity is preserved in such a model and the resulting cooperative games are balanced. In this framework, an incentive compatible core concept is defined for NTU games derived from economies with asymmetric information. The main result is nonemptiness of the incentive compatible core.

At an stage players possessing only their private information freely communicate with each other to coordinate their strategies. This results in a core strategy, which is interpreted as an equilibrium set of players’ alternative type-contingent contract offers to their fellows. From this set of offers each player then chooses an optimal one and engages in some subsequent action, thus possibly revealing some private information to the others. Now with new information thus obtained from each other, the players play a new game to re-write their contract. In all of the optimization and gaming just described, Bayesian incentive compatibility plays a central role. These ideas are formulated within a model of a profit-center game with incomplete information which formally describes interaction of the asymmetrically informed profit-centers in Chandler’s multidivisional firm.

The purpose of this paper is to derive the structure of optimal multilateral contracts in a costly state verification model with multiple agents who may be risk averse and need not be identical. We consider two different verification technology specifications. When the verification technology is deterministic, we show that the optimal contract is a multilateral debt contract in the sense that the monitoring set is a lower interval. When the verification technology is stochastic, we show that transfers and monitoring probabilities are decreasing functions of wealth. The key economic problem in this environment is that optimal contracts are . We are able to resolve this interdependency problem by using abstract measure theoretic tools.

The paper extends Diamond’s (1984) analysis of financial contracting with information asymmetry and endogenous “bankruptcy penalties” to allow for risk aversion of the borrower. The optimality of , which Diamond obtained for the case of risk neutrality, is shown to be nonrobust to the introduction of risk aversion. This contrasts with the costly state verification literature, in which debt contracts are optimal for risk averse as well as risk neutral borrowers.

In this paper we introduce a new model of contracting for economies with asymmetric information to examine endogenously determined communication plans for information sharing in the stage. In contrast to the models used in previous research, in the present model agents negotiate not only on a contract of state contingent allocations but also on a communication plan, a set of rules describing how agents will reveal part of their private information at the stage to execute the trade contracts. We prove a result about the nested structure of the set of allocations implementable by various communication plans and establish the existence of core strategies for this cooperative game under various regularity conditions.

The paper seeks to characterize what information is always available for contracting, independent of the form of the contract and the probabilities of different states of nature. The paper denotes such information as . It is established that it is possible to speak uniquely of . Several characterizations are exhibited. In particular, it is shown that if either (a) punishments are bounded everywhere, or (b) deviations from truth-telling are either always or never detected, then maximum contractible information coincides with ∧ ∨ where is the information partition of agent . An argument is given for why (b) may be expected to hold.