Eva I. Hoppe

Public-Private Partnerships versus Traditional Procurement: Innovation Incentives and Information Gathering

A government agency wants a facility to be built and managed to provide a public service. Two different modes of provision are considered. In a public-private partnership, the tasks of building and managing are bundled, whereas under traditional procurement, these tasks are delegated to separate private contractors. The two provision modes differ in their incentives to innovate and to gather private information about future costs to adapt the service provision to changing circumstances. The government agencys preferred mode of provision depends on the information gathering costs, the costs of innovation efforts, and on the degree to which effort is contractible.

Can Contracts Solve the Hold-Up Problem? Experimental Evidence

In the contract-theoretic literature, there is a vital debate about whether contracts can mitigate the hold-up problem, in particular when renegotiation cannot be prevented. Ultimately, this question has to be answered empirically. As a first step, we have conducted a laboratory experiment with 960 participants. We consider investments that directly benefit the non-investing party. While according to standard theory, contracting would be useless if renegotiation cannot be ruled out, we find that option contracts significantly improve investment incentives compared to a no-contract treatment. This finding might be attributed to Hart and Moores (2008) recent idea that contracts can serve as reference points.

Conflicting Tasks and Moral Hazard: Theory and Experimental Evidence

We study a multi-task principal-agent problem in which tasks can be in direct conflict with each other. In theory, it is difficult to induce a single agent to exert efforts in two conflicting tasks, because effort in one task decreases the success probability of the other task. We have conducted an experiment in which we find strong support for the relevance of this incentive problem. In the presence of conflict, subjects choose two efforts significantly less often when both tasks are assigned to a single agent than when there are two agents each in charge of one task.

The Costs and Benefits of Additional Information in Agency Models with Endogenous Information Structures

We study the effect of additional private information in an agency model with an endogenous information structure. If more private information becomes available to the agent, this may hurt the agent, benefit the principal, and affect the total surplus ambiguously.

Do Sellers Offer Menus of Contracts to Separate Buyer Types? An Experimental Test of Adverse Selection Theory

In the basic adverse selection model, a seller makes a contract offer to a privately informed buyer. A fundamental hypothesis of incentive theory is that the seller may want to offer a menu of contracts to separate the buyer types. In the good state of nature, total surplus is not different from the symmetric information benchmark, while in the bad state, private information may be welfare-reducing. We have conducted a laboratory experiment with 954 participants to test these hypotheses. While the results largely corroborate the theoretical predictions, we also find that private information may be welfare-enhancing in the good state.

Hidden action and outcome contractibility: An experimental test of moral hazard theory

In a laboratory experiment with 754 participants, we study the canonical one-shot moral hazard problem, comparing treatments with unobservable effort to benchmark treatments with verifiable effort. In our experiment, the players endogenously negotiate contracts. In line with contract theory, the contractibility of the outcome plays a crucial role when effort is a hidden action. If the outcome is contractible, most players overcome the hidden action problem by agreeing on incentive-compatible contracts. Communication is helpful, since it may reduce strategic uncertainty. If the outcome is non-contractible, in most cases low effort is chosen whenever effort is a hidden action. However, communication leads the players to agree on larger wages and substantially mitigates the underprovision of effort.