Helmut Bester

Freie Universität Berlin | FUB · School of Business and Economics

We show that in a bilateral relation with conflicting preferences and transferable utility it is unambiguously optimal to assign the authority over project decisions to the privately informed rather than the uninformed party. This holds irrespective of the degree of conflict and the distribution of private information. Under the optimal contract, t...

This paper studies a model whereby exclusive dealing (ED) can both promote investment and foreclose a more efficient supplier. Since ED promotes the incumbent seller's investment, the seller and the buyer realize a greater surplus from bilateral trade under exclusivity. Hence, the parties involved may sign an ED contract that excludes a more effici...

We analyze the effect of loan sales on the intensity of costly screening. Loan sales strengthen screening incentives when screening primarily improves the bank’s ability to identify profitable loans and when banks retain most of those profitable loans. However, loan sales dampen screening incentives when the benefit of screening primarily helps to...

This paper invalidates the claim that a decreasing concavity of the agent's utility function with type guarantees the optimality of deterministic mechanisms in principal–agent settings with adverse selection and quasi– linear utilities. Subsequently, it readdresses the question of the optimality of deterministic mechanisms. It demonstrates that an...

This paper considers a market in which only the incumbent's quality is publicly known. The entrant's quality is observed by the incumbent and some fraction of informed consumers. This leads to price signalling rivalry between the duopolists, because the incumbent gains and the entrant loses when observed prices make the uninformed consumers more pe...

This paper studies investment incentives in the steady state of a dynamic bilateral matching market. Because of search frictions, both parties in a match are partially locked-in when they bargain over the joint surplus from their sunk investments. The associated holdup problem depends on market conditions and is more important for the long side of...

This paper analyzes bilateral contracting in an environment with contractual incompleteness and asymmetric information. One party (the seller) makes an unverifiable quality choice and the other party (the buyer) has private information about its valuation. A simple exit option contract, which allows the buyer to refuse trade, achieves the first–bes...

This article analyzes the relation between authority and incentives. It extends the standard principal-agent model by a project selection stage in which the principal can either delegate the choice of project to the agent or keep the authority. The agent's subsequent choice of effort depends both on monetary incentives and the selected project. We...

This paper provides new analytical tools for studying principal-agent problems with adverse selection and limited commitment. By allowing the principal to use general communication devices we overcome the literature's common, but overly restrictive focus on one-shot, direct communication. In addition, general communication devices solve two fundame...

We consider social contracts for resolving conflicts between two agents who are uncertain about each other's fighting potential. Applications include international conflict, litigation and elections. Even though only a peaceful agreement avoids a loss of resources, if this loss is small enough, then any contract must assign a positive probability o...

This paper views authority as the right to undertake decisions that impose externalities on other members of the organization. When only decision rights can be contractually assigned to one of the organization's stakeholders, the optimal assignment minimizes the resulting inefficiencies by giving control rights to the party with the highest stake i...

This paper studies the intertemporal problem of a monopolistic firm that engages in productivity enhancing innovations to reduce labor costs. The optimal innovation policy is not monotone and the rate of productivity growth is the highest when the firm's size is in some intermediate range. As long as its initial productivity is not too low, the fir...

This chapter is about job rationing and segmented labour markets. It analyses labour market equilibrium when job applicants cannot observe directly the amount of specific training that is provided by different firms. But employees become aware of the quality of training and their productivity as the employment relationship evolves. This is importan...

Corruption in the public sector erodes tax compliance and leads to higher tax evasion. Moreover, corrupt public officials abuse their public power to extort bribes from the private agents. In both types of interaction with the public sector, the private agents are bound to face uncertainty with respect to their disposable incomes. To analyse effect...

Contestants have to choose whether to initiate a contest or war, or whether to remain peaceful for another period. We find that agents wait and initiate the contest once their rival is sufficiently weak to be an easy target.

This paper reviews the economic literature on the role of fees in patent systems. Two main research questions are usually addressed: the impact of patent fees on the behavior of applicants and the question of optimal fees. Studies in the former group confirm that a range of fees affect the behavior of applicants and suggest that a patent is an inel...

Why is there delay in contests? In this paper, we follow and extend the line of reasoning of Carl von Clausewitz to explain delay. For a given contest technology, delay may occur if there is an asymmetry between defense and attack, if the expected change in relative strengths is moderate, and if the additional cost of investment in future strength...

This Paper views authority as the right to undertake decisions that have external effects on other members of the organization. Because of contractual incompleteness, monetary incentives are insufficient to internalize these effects in the decision-maker’s objective. The optimal assignment of decision rights minimizes the resulting inefficiencies....

We examine the commitment effect of delegated bargaining when the delegation contract is renegotiable. We consider a seller who can either bargain face-to-face with a prospective buyer or delegate bargaining to an intermediary. The intermediary is able to interrupt negotiating with the buyer to renegotiate the delegation contract. We show that the...

This paper extends the revelation principle to environments in which the mechanism designer cannot fully commit to the outcome induced by the mechanism. We show that he may optimally use a direct mechanism under which truthful revelation is an optimal strategy for the agent. In contrast with the conventional revelation principle, however, the agent...

We consider mechanism design problems with n agents when the mechanism designer cannot fully commit to an allocation function. With a single agent (n=1) optimal mechanisms can always be represented by direct mechanisms, under which each agent’s message set is the set of his possible types [Bester, H., Strausz, R., 2000. Contracting with imperfect c...

Consider a market where an informed monopolist sets the price for a good or asset with a value unknown to potential buyers. Upon observing the price, buyers may pay some cost for information about the value before deciding on purchases. Under a belief-restriction, which generalizes the idea of the Cho–Kreps ‘intuitive criterion’, we establish a ver...

I present the idea that imperfect information about the (vertical) quality characteristics of goods reduces the sellers' incentives for horizontal product differentiation. As a result, the equilibrium outcome may be characterized by "minimum differentiation." In a spatial framework this implies that firms tend to choose head-on competition by agglo...

We consider Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanisms for resolving conflicts between two agents who are uncertain about each other's fighting potential. We model the default option of outright conflict as a probabilistic contest. Examples of such contests may be international conflict, litigation, and elections. We show, i...

This paper studies sales promotion through coupons in a duopolistic market. Sending out coupons allows the sellers to separate market segments with different degrees of consumer brand loyalty. This kind of price discrimination is profitable for the individual seller when the cost of couponing is sufficiently low. In equilibrium, however, couponing...

We study the location equilibrium in Hotelling's model of spatial competition. As d'Aspremontet al.have shown, with quadratic consumer transportation cost the two sellers will seek to move as far away from each other as possible. We show that the location game possesses an infinity of mixed strategy Nash equilibria. In these equilibria coordination...

Children in households reporting the receipt of free or reduced price school meals through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) are more likely to have negative health outcomes than eligible nonparticipants. Assessing the causal effects of the program is made difficult, however, by the presence of endogenous selection into the program and syste...

In a financial market, the investor searches for investment projects and bargains with the entrepreneur about the financial contract. Alternatively, he may delegate search and bargaining to a financial intermediary. Delegation generates a commitment advantage in bargaining. It may, however, induce excessively risky investments because the investor...

We investigate the role of price advertising in a market where consumers are imperfectly informed about prices. We consider a monopolist whose demand depends on price and advertising expenditure. This demand function is derived from optimizing behavior of consumers. Uninformed consumers may pay a cost to visit the seller and obtain price informatio...

We develop an evolutionary approach to explain altruistic preferences. Given their preferences, individuals interact rationally with each other. By comparing the success of players with different preferences, we investigate whether evolution favors altruistic or selfish attitudes. The outcome depends on whether the individuals' interactions are str...

This paper studies the effect of debt renegotiation on the design of optimal loan arrangements in a model of borrowing and lending with asymmetric information. Renegotiation may occur because bankruptcy involves costly asset liquidation, which is ex post inefficient. The author shows that the extent of the entrepreneur's liabilities in the optimal...

This paper provides a survey on studies that analyze the macroeconomic effects of intellectual property rights (IPR). The first part of this paper introduces different patent policy instruments and reviews their effects on R&D and economic growth. This part also discusses the distortionary effects and distributional consequences of IPR protection a...

This paper studies the formation of pricing rules in search markets. At a cost, each seller can commit himself to a fixed price. If he takes no actions to preclude haggling, his sales price is determined through bilateral negotiations with the buyer. The selection of pricing rules exhibits strategic complementarities that may give rise to multiple...

This paper studies the stability of price competition in a horizontally differentiated duopoly. The firms' demand is derived from a distribution of consumer preferences. This description of the consumer sector is applicable to a large class of differentiated commodity markets, including spatial competition models. The author shows that there is a (...

We study the location equilibrium in Hotelling's model of spatial competition. As d'Aspremont et al. (1979) have shown, with quadratic consumer transportation cost the two sellers will seek to move as far away from each other as possible. This generates a coordination problem which the literature typically ignores by restricting firm 1 to locate in...

This article presents a model in which markets for long-term contractual employment coexist with spot markets for labor. Assuming the absence of third-party enforcement, wage contracts are required to be incentive compatible. As a consequence, contract wages yield higher expected utility to the worker than spot-market wages so that, in equilibrium,...

The article develops a bargaining model of spatial competition. Sellers compete by choosing locations in a market region. Consumers face a cost to moving from one place to another. The price of the good is determined as the perfect equilibrium of a bargaining game between seller and buyer. In this game, the buyer has the outside option to move to a...

Bargaining between a single seller and a succession of potential bu yers of an indivisible object is studied in this paper. The seller bargains with one buyer at a time and switching buyers is costly. The seller does not know the buyers' reservation prices and buyers cannot observe the quality of the object. If the costs of switching buyers are hig...

This paper studies a bargaining model of equilibrium price distributions. Consumers choose a seller at random and face search costs to switching to another store. In the market equilibrium, the prices at all stores are determined simultaneously as the perfect equilibrium of a bargaining game. In this game, the buyer has the outside option to search...

One of the more intriguing puzzles in microeconomics is presented by the phenomenon of credit rationing. If funds are so scarce as to require rationing, why do lenders not raise the interest that they demand? We survey recent developments that seek to explain this phenomenon by appealing to incentive problems in the relation between the borrower an...

The paper analyzes the structure of credit market equilibrium under imperfect information. Collateralization and credit rationing are compared as alternative means to cope with problems of adverse selection and moral hazard. It is shown that lenders may use collateral as a self-selection and incentive mechanism. Rationing occurs only if the borrowe...

The classical foundation of general equilibrium analysis by the cooperative concept of the core has been extended to an economy with incomplete trading possibilities. This has been accomplished by restricting the exchange possibilities of coalitions of traders in accordance with the available market structure. However, compared with the classical r...

The impact of increasing risk on social welfare and resource allocation is analysed in a general equilibrium model with endowment uncertainty. It is shown that the equilibrium allocation of resources is affected only by an increase in those risks which are important for society as a whole. In contrast, increases in purely individual risk do not inf...

It is shown that, in the absence of insurance markets, an increase in risk may be beneficial to all consumers. Sufficient conditions to exclude this possibility appear as extremely restrictive.

It is shown that shareholder unanimity in the mean variance model of capital asset markets implies production decisions which maximize the net market value of a firm in a ‘large’ stock market.

This paper studies the innovation dynamics of an oligopolistic industry. The firms compete not only in the output market but also by engaging in productivity enhancing innovations to reduce labor costs. Rent sharing may generate productivity dependent wage differentials. Productivity growth creates intertemporal spill-over effects, which affect the...