In a corporation with many small owners, it may not pay any one of them to monitor the performance of the management We explore a model in which the presence of a large minority shareholder provides a partial solution to this free-rider problem The model sheds light on the following questions: Under what circumstances will we observe a tender offer as opposed to a proxy fight or an internal management shake-up? How strong are the forces pushing toward increasing concentration of ownership of a diffusely held firm? Why do corporate and personal investors commonly hold stock in the same firm, despite their disparate tax preferences?

https://ecsocman.hse.ru/data/844/126/1231/shleifer_vishny_-_1986.pdf

Large Shareholders and Corporate Control

This paper determines when a debt contract will be monitored by lenders. This is the choice between borrowing directly (issuing a bond, without monitoring) and borrowing through a bank that monitors to alleviate moral hazard. This provides a theory of bank loan demand and of the role of monitoring in circumstances in which reputation effects are important. A key result is that borrowers with credit ratings toward the middle of the spectrum rely on bank loans, and in periods of high interest rates or low future profitability, higher-rated borrowers choose to borrow from banks.

Monitoring and Reputation: The Choice between Bank Loans and Directly Placed Debt

A central tenet of economics is that individuals respond to incentives. For psychologists and sociologists, in contrast, rewards and punishments are often counterproductive, because they undermine "intrinsic motivation". We reconcile these two views, showing how performance incentives offered by an informed principal (manager, teacher, parent) can adversely impact an agent's (worker, child) perception of the task, or of his own abilities. Incentives are then only weak reinforcers in the short run, and negative reinforcers in the long run. We also study the effects of empowerment, help and excuses on motivation, as well as situations of ego bashing reflecting a battle for dominance within a relationship.

/pdf/intrinsic-and-extrinsic-motivation-7fbia6fbrl.pdf

Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivation

Economics has much to do with incentives--not least, incentives to work hard, to produce quality products, to study, to invest, and to save. Although Adam Smith amply confirmed this more than two hundred years ago in his analysis of sharecropping contracts, only in recent decades has a theory begun to emerge to place the topic at the heart of economic thinking. In this book, Jean-Jacques Laffont and David Martimort present the most thorough yet accessible introduction to incentives theory to date. Central to this theory is a simple question as pivotal to modern-day management as it is to economics research: What makes people act in a particular way in an economic or business situation? In seeking an answer, the authors provide the methodological tools to design institutions that can ensure good incentives for economic agents. This book focuses on the principal-agent model, the "simple" situation where a principal, or company, delegates a task to a single agent through a contract--the essence of management and contract theory. How does the owner or manager of a firm align the objectives of its various members to maximize profits? Following a brief historical overview showing how the problem of incentives has come to the fore in the past two centuries, the authors devote the bulk of their work to exploring principal-agent models and various extensions thereof in light of three types of information problems: adverse selection, moral hazard, and non-verifiability. Offering an unprecedented look at a subject vital to industrial organization, labor economics, and behavioral economics, this book is set to become the definitive resource for students, researchers, and others who might find themselves pondering what contracts, and the incentives they embody, are really all about.

/pdf/the-theory-of-incentives-the-principal-agent-model-5dmc8btucq.pdf

The Theory of Incentives: The Principal-Agent Model

Biological signals as handicaps.

Games in which one party conveys private information to a second through messages typically admit large numbers of sequential equilibria, as the second party may entertain a wealth of beliefs in response to out-of-equilibrium messages. By restricting those out-of equilibrium beliefs, one can sometimes eliminate many unintuitive equilibria. We present a number of formal restrictions of this sort, investigate their behavior in specific examples, and relate these restrictions to Kohlberg and Mertens` notion of stability.

/pdf/signaling-games-and-stable-equilibria-39s9k0ixri.pdf

Signaling Games and Stable Equilibria

https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~jsobel/Papers/StrategicStabilitySignaling.pdf

Strategic stability and uniqueness in signaling games

Mean dynamics govern convergence to rational expectations equilibria of self-referential systems under least squares learning. We highlight escape dynamics that propel away from a rational expectations equilibrium under fixed-gain recursive learning schemes. These learning schemes discount past observations. In a model with a unique self-confirming equilibrium, we show that the destination of the escape dynamics is an outcome associated with government discovery of too strong a version of the natural rate hypothesis. That destination is not sustainable as a self-confirming equilibrium but is visited recurrently. The escape route dynamics cause recurrent outcomes close to the Ramsey (commitment) inflation rate in a model with an adaptive government.

Escaping Nash Inflation

An ordinary differential equation (ODE) gives the mean dynamics that govern the convergence to self-confirming equilibria of self-referential systems under discounted least squares learning. Another ODE governs escape dynamics that recurrently propel away from a self-confirming equilibrium. In a model with a unique self-confirming equilibrium, the escape dynamics make the government discover too strong a version of the natural rate hypothesis. The escape route dynamics cause recurrent outcomes close to the Ramsey (commitment) inflation rate in a model with an adaptive government.

/pdf/escaping-nash-inflation-rngeg2mqz7.pdf

This paper studies adaptive learning with multiple models. An agent operating in a self-referential environment is aware of potential model misspecification, and tries to detect it, in real-time, using an econometric specification test. If the current model passes the test, it is used to construct an optimal policy. If it fails the test, a new model is selected. As the rate of coefficient updating decreases, one model becomes dominant, and is used “almost always”. Dominant models can be characterized using the tools of large deviations theory. The analysis is used to address two questions posed by Sargent's Phillips Curve model.

/pdf/learning-and-model-validation-24hvtflvux.pdf

In-Koo Cho

Papers

Signaling Games and Stable Equilibria

Strategic stability and uniqueness in signaling games

Escaping Nash Inflation

Escaping Nash Inflation

Learning and Model Validation