Delegating Investment in a Common-Value Project

Suzanne Scotchmer

No E99-266, Economics Working Papers from University of California at Berkeley

Abstract: I investigate the problem of delegating an investment effort when it is not known in advance which firm is most efficient, or whether the investment should be made at all. The motivating problem is that of commissioning R instead of relying on patent incentives. Firms have different private signals of a project's private (and social) value, and different costs of achieving it. I show that the two allocation problems of (i) making an efficient decision whether to invest, and (ii) delegating the investment to the least-cost firm can simultaneously be solved with no more profit dissipation than a procurement mechanism would require, assuming that the signals of value were known in advance.

Date: 1999-03-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cfn and nep-mic
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/groups/iber/wps/econ/E99-266.pdf main text (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 404 Not Found (http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/groups/iber/wps/econ/E99-266.pdf [301 Moved Permanently]--> http://haas.berkeley.edu/groups/iber/wps/econ/E99-266.pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Delegating Investment in a Common-Value Project (2000)
Working Paper: Delegating Investment in a Common-Value Project (1999)
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:ucb:calbwp:e99-266

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IBER, F502 Haas Building, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720-1922

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economics Working Papers from University of California at Berkeley University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA USA. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Christopher F. Baum ().