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Articles 1 - 18 of 18
Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Consumer Bankruptcy, Mortgage Default And Labor Supply, Wenli Li, Costas Meghir, Florian Oswald
Consumer Bankruptcy, Mortgage Default And Labor Supply, Wenli Li, Costas Meghir, Florian Oswald
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We specify and estimate a lifecycle model of consumption, housing demand and labor supply in an environment where individuals may file for bankruptcy or default on their mortgage. Uncertainty in the model is driven by house price shocks, education specific productivity shocks, and catastrophic consumption events, while bankruptcy is governed by the basic institutional framework in the US as implied by Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. The model is estimated using micro data on credit reports and mortgages combined with data from the American Community Survey. We use the model to understand the relative importance of the two chapters (7 …
A Structural Model Of A Multitasking Salesforce: Multidimensional Incentives And Plan Design, Minkyung Kim, K. Sudhir, Kosuke Uetake
A Structural Model Of A Multitasking Salesforce: Multidimensional Incentives And Plan Design, Minkyung Kim, K. Sudhir, Kosuke Uetake
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We develop the first structural model of a multitasking salesforce to address questions of job design and incentive compensation design. The model incorporates three novel features: (i) multitasking effort choice given a multidimensional incentive plan; (ii) salesperson’s private information about customers and (iii) dynamic intertemporal tradeoffs in effort choice across the tasks. The empirical application uses data from a micro nance bank where loan officers are jointly responsible and incentivized for both loan acquisition repayment but has broad relevance for salesforce management in CRM settings involving customer acquisition and retention. We extend two-step estimation methods used for unidimensional compensation plans …
When Salespeople Manage Customer Relationships: Multidimensional Incentives And Private Information, Minkyung Kim, K. Sudhir, Kosuke Uetake, Rodrigo Canales
When Salespeople Manage Customer Relationships: Multidimensional Incentives And Private Information, Minkyung Kim, K. Sudhir, Kosuke Uetake, Rodrigo Canales
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
At many firms, incentivized salespeople with private information about customers are responsible for CRM. While incentives motivate sales performance, private information can induce moral hazard by salespeople to gain compensation at the expense of the firm. We investigate the sales performance–moral hazard tradeoff in response to multidimensional performance (acquisition and maintenance) incentives in the presence of private information. Using unique panel data on customer loan acquisition and repayments linked to salespeople from a microfinance bank, we detect evidence of salesperson private information. Acquisition incentives induce salesperson moral hazard leading to adverse customer selection, but maintenance incentives moderate it as salespeople …
Dynamic Moral Hazard Without Commitment, Johannes Hörner, Larry Samuelson
Dynamic Moral Hazard Without Commitment, Johannes Hörner, Larry Samuelson
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study a discrete-time model of repeated moral hazard without commitment. In every period, a principal finances a project, choosing the scale of the project and a contingent payment plan for an agent, who has the opportunity to appropriate the returns of a successful project unbeknownst the principal. The absence of commitment is reflected both in the solution concept (perfect Bayesian equilibrium) and in the ability of the principal to freely revise the project’s scale from one period to the next. We show that removing commitment from the equilibrium concept is relatively innocuous — if the players are sufficiently patient, …
Optimally Empty Promises And Endogenous Supervision, David A. Miller, Kareen Rozen
Optimally Empty Promises And Endogenous Supervision, David A. Miller, Kareen Rozen
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study optimal contracting in team settings, featuring stylized aspects of production environments with complex tasks. Agents have many opportunities to shirk, task-level monitoring is needed to provide useful incentives, and because it is difficult to write individual performance into formal contracts, incentives are provided informally, using wasteful sanctions like guilt and shame, or slowed promotion. These features give rise to optimal contracts with “empty promises” and endogenous supervision structures. Agents optimally make more promises than they intend to keep, leading to the concentration of supervisory responsibility in the hands of one or two agents.
Monitoring With Collective Memory: Forgiveness For Optimally Empty Promises, David A. Miller, Kareen Rozen
Monitoring With Collective Memory: Forgiveness For Optimally Empty Promises, David A. Miller, Kareen Rozen
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We study optimal contracting in a team setting with moral hazard, where teammates promise to complete socially efficient but costly tasks. Teammates must monitor each other to provide incentives, but each team member has limited capacity to allocate between monitoring and productive tasks. Players incur contractual punishments for unfulfilled promises that are discovered. We show that optimal contracts are generally “forgiving” and players optimally make “empty promises” that they don’t necessarily intend to fulfill. As uncertainty in task completion increases, players optimally make more empty promises but fewer total promises. A principal who hires a team of agents optimally implements …
Collaborating, Alessandro Bonatti, Johannes Hörner
Collaborating, Alessandro Bonatti, Johannes Hörner
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
This paper examines moral hazard in teams over time. Agents are collectively engaged in an uncertain project, and their individual efforts are unobserved. Free-riding leads not only to a reduction in effort, but also to procrastination. The collaboration dwindles over time, but never ceases as long as the project has not succeeded. In fact, the delay until the project succeeds, if it ever does, increases with the number of agents. We show why deadlines, but not necessarily better monitoring, help to mitigate moral hazard.
Catalytic Finance: When Does It Work?, Stephen Morris, Hyun Song Shin
Catalytic Finance: When Does It Work?, Stephen Morris, Hyun Song Shin
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
In a simple model of currency crises caused by creditor coordination failure, we show that bailouts that reduce ex post inefficiency will sometimes create ex ante moral hazard but will sometimes enhance the incentives for governments to take preventative actions. This model helps us understand a debate about the role of the IMF in catalyzing lending to developing countries.
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We extend the standard model of general equilibrium with incomplete markets to allow for default and punishment. The equilibrating variables include expected delivery rates, along with the usual prices of assets and commodities. By reinterpreting the variables, our model encompasses a broad range of moral hazard, adverse selection, and signalling phenomena (including the Akerlof lemons model and Rothschild-Stiglitz insurance model) in a general equilibrium framework. We impose a condition on the expected delivery rates for untraded assets that is similar to the trembling hand refinements used in game theory. Despite earlier claims about the nonexistence of equilibrium with adverse selection, …
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We extend the standard model of general equilibrium with incomplete markets to allow for default and punishment by thinking of assets as pools. The equilibrating variables include expected delivery rates, along with the usual prices of assets and commodities. By reinterpreting the variables, our model encompasses a broad range of adverse selection and signalling phenomena in a perfectly competitive, general equilibrium framework. Perfect competition eliminates the need for lenders to compute how the size of their loan or the price they quote might affect default rates. It also makes for a simple equilibrium refinement, which we propose in order to …
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We extend the standard model of general equilibrium with incomplete markets to allow for default and punishment by thinking of assets as pools. The equilibrating variables include expected delivery rates, along with the usual prices of assets and commodities. By reinterpreting the variables, our model encompasses a broad range of adverse selection and signalling phenomena in a perfectly competitive, general equilibrium framework. Perfect competition eliminates the need for lenders to compute how the size of their loan or the price they quote might affect default rates. It also makes for a simple equilibrium refinement, which we propose in order to …
Signalling And Default: Rothschild-Stiglitz Reconsidered, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos
Signalling And Default: Rothschild-Stiglitz Reconsidered, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
In our previous paper we built a general equilibrium model of default and punishment in which equilibrium always exists and endogenously determines asset promises, penalties, and sales constraints. In this paper we interpret the endogenous sales constraints as equilibrium signals. By specializing the default penalties and imposing an exclusivity constraint on asset sales, we obtain a perfectly competitive version of the Rothschild-Stiglitz model of insurance. In our model their separating equilibrium always exists even when they say it doesn’t.
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We extend the standard model of general equilibrium with incomplete markets to allow for default and punishment. The equilibrating variables include expected delivery rates, along with the usual prices of assets and commodities. By reinterpreting the variables, our model encompasses a broad range of adverse selection, and signalling phenomena (including the Akerlof lemons model and Rothschild-Stiglitz insurance model) and some moral hazard problems in a general equilibrium framework. Despite earlier claims about the nonexistence of equilibrium with adverse selection, we show that equilibrium always exists. We show that more lenient punishment which encourages default may be Pareto improving because it …
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We extend the standard model of general equilibrium with incomplete markets to allow for default and punishment. The equilibrating variables include expected delivery rates, along with the usual prices of assets and commodities. By reinterpreting the variables, our model encompasses a broad range of adverse selection and signalling phenomena (including the Akerlof lemons model and the Rothschild-Stiglitz insurance model) in a general equilibrium framework. Despite earlier claims about the nonexistence of equilibrium with adverse selection, we show that equilibrium always exists. We show that more lenient punishment which encourages default may be Pareto improving because it increases the dimension of …
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Default And Punishment In General Equilibrium, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We extend the standard model of general equilibrium with incomplete markets to allow for default and punishment by thinking of assets as pools. The equilibrating variables include expected delivery rates, along with the usual prices of assets and commodities. By reinterpreting the variables, our model encompasses a broad range of adverse selection and signalling phenomena (including the Rothschild-Stiglitz insurance model) in a general equilibrium framework. In contrast to game-theoretic models of adverse selection, our perfectly competitive framework eliminates the need for lenders to compute how the size of their loan or the price they quote might affect default rates. The …
Default In A General Equilibrium Model With Incomplete Markets, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Default In A General Equilibrium Model With Incomplete Markets, Pradeep Dubey, John Geanakoplos, Martin Shubik
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We extend the standard model of general equilibrium with incomplete markets (GEI) to allow for default. The equilibrating variables include aggregate default levels, as well as prices of assets and commodities. Default can be either strategic, or due to ill-fortune. It can be caused by events directly affecting the borrower, or indirectly as part of a chain reaction in which a borrower cannot repay because he himself has not been repaid. Each asset is defined by its promises A , the penalties lambda for default, and the limitations Q on its sale. The model is thus named GE ( A …
Warranties, Durability, And Maintenance: Two Sided Moral Hazard In A Continuous-Time Model, Philip H. Dybvig, Nancy A. Lutz
Warranties, Durability, And Maintenance: Two Sided Moral Hazard In A Continuous-Time Model, Philip H. Dybvig, Nancy A. Lutz
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
We consider the provision of an optimal warranty in a continuous-time model with two-sided moral hazard. The optimal warranty must balance the producer’s durability incentive and the buyer’s maintenance incentive. Too little warranty protection gives the producer too much incentive to produce low durability, while too much warranty protection gives the consumer too much incentive to neglect maintenance. The derived optimal warranty is a “block warranty” that is high for an initial block of time and zero thereafter. The first-best would be available under a very high warranty for a very short time interval, except for the incentive this would …
Warranties As Signals Under Consumer Moral Hazard, Nancy A. Lutz
Warranties As Signals Under Consumer Moral Hazard, Nancy A. Lutz
Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers
In this paper, I examine whether and how warranties serve as signals of product quality in an environment where there are opportunities for consumer moral hazard. My model is very similar to Grossman’s. A risk neutral monopolist produced a good of fixed and exogenous quality. This product is offered to a market of identical risk-averse consumers, and it can be bundled with a warranty of the monopolist’s choosing. The probability that the product breaks down is a function of its quality and the effort the consumer takes in using it. This consumer effort cannot be observed by the monopolist or …