Incentive compatibility and pricing under moral hazard [An article from: Review of Economic Dynamics]

This digital document is a journal article from Review of Economic Dynamics, published by Elsevier in 2005. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Media Library immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Description:
We show how to recover equilibrium prices supporting incentive-efficient allocations in a classic insurance economy with moral hazard. Our key modeling choice is to impose the incentive-compatibility constraints on insurance firms, and not on consumers as in Prescott and Townsend [Pareto optima and competitive equilibria with adverse selection and moral hazard, Econometrica 52 (1984) 21-45]. We show that equilibrium prices of insurance contracts are equal to the sum of the shadow costs arising from the resource and incentive-compatibility constraints in the planner's problem. The equilibrium allocations are the same as when the incentive-compatibility constraints are imposed on consumers. As in Prescott and Townsend, the two welfare theorems hold.