Moral Hazard and Non-Exclusive Contracts

Alberto Bisin and Danilo Guaitoli

No 1987, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: This paper studies equilibria for economies characterized by moral hazard (hidden action), in which the set of contracts marketed in equilibrium is determined by the interaction of financial intermediaries. The crucial aspect of the environment that we study is that intermediaries are restricted to trade non-exclusive contracts: the agents' contractual relationships with competing intermediaries cannot be monitored (or are not contractible upon). We fully characterize equilibrium allocations and contracts. In this set-up equilibrium allocations are clearly incentive-constrained inefficient. A robust property of equilibria with non-exclusivity is that the contracts issued in equilibrium do not implement the optimal action. Moreover we prove that, whenever equilibrium contracts do implement the optimal action, intermediaries make positive profits and equilibrium allocations are third best inefficient (where the definition of third best efficiency accounts for constraints which capture the non-exclusivity of contracts).

Keywords: Asymmetric Information; Efficiency; exclusivity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D61 D82 G20 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.cepr.org/active/publications/discussion_papers/dp.php?dpno=1987 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Moral Hazard and Nonexclusive Contracts (2004)
Working Paper: Moral Hazard and Non-Exclusive Contracts (1998)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:1987

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.cepr.org/ ... ers/dp.php?dpno=1987

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().