Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Political Economy Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Political Economy

Progressive Screening: Long Term Contracting With A Privately Known Stochastic Process, Raphael Boleslavsky, Maher Said Dec 2012

Progressive Screening: Long Term Contracting With A Privately Known Stochastic Process, Raphael Boleslavsky, Maher Said

Raphael Boleslavsky

We examine a model of long-term contracting in which the buyer is privately informed about the stochastic process by which her value for a good evolves. In addition, the realized values are also private information. We characterize a class of environments in which the profit-maximizing long-term contract offered by a monopolist takes an especially simple structure: we derive sufficient conditions on primitives under which the optimal contract consists of a menu of deterministic sequences of static contracts. Within each sequence, higher realized values lead to greater quantity provision; however, an increasing proportion of buyer types are excluded over time, eventually …


Selloffs, Bailouts, And Feedback: Can Asset Markets Inform Policy?, Raphael Boleslavsky, David L. Kelly, Curtis R. Taylor Dec 2012

Selloffs, Bailouts, And Feedback: Can Asset Markets Inform Policy?, Raphael Boleslavsky, David L. Kelly, Curtis R. Taylor

Raphael Boleslavsky

We present a model in which a policymaker observes trade in a financial asset before deciding whether to intervene in the economy, for example by offering a bailout or monetary stimulus. Because an intervention erodes the value of private information, informed investors are reluctant to take short positions and selloffs are, therefore, less likely and less informative. The policymaker faces a tradeoff between eliciting information from the asset market and using the information so obtained. In general she can elicit more information if she commits to intervene only infrequently. She thus may benefit from imperfections in the intervention process or …