Nonlinear Incentive Provision in Walrasian Markets: A Cournot Convergence Approach

Publication Type  Preprints
Author  Martin Hellwig
Year of Publication  2004
Issue  2004/08
Abstract  The paper studies insurance with moral hazard in a system of contingent-claims markets. Insurance buyers are modelled as Cournot monopolists or oligopolists. The other agents condition their expectations on market prices, as in models of rational-expectations equilibrium with asymmetric information. Thereby they correctly anticipate accident probabilities corresponding to effort incentives induced by insurance buyers' net trades. When there are many agents to share the insurance buyer's risk, Cournot equilibrium outcomes are close to being second-best. In contrast, if insurance buyers are price takers, equilibria fail to exist or are bounded away from being second-best.
Pagination  51
Publisher  Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods
Place Published  Bonn
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Published in:  Journal of Economic Theory, vol. 120, pp. 1-38, 2005
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Keywords  Moral Hazard, Incentive Contracting, Walrasian Markets, Rational-Expectations, Cournot Equilibrium, Insurance
JEL-Codes  D62, D50, D80