Keith J. Crocker

The efficiency of incomplete contracts: an empirical analysis of air force engine procurement

This article examines the incentives of contractual parties to design agreements that are left intentionally incomplete with regard to future duties or contingencies. More complete contracts mitigate ex post opportunism and the associated distortions in unobservable investment, but at the cost of additional resources expended in ex ante design. The optimal degree of contractual incompleteness involves a tradeoff between these opposing forces, the magnitudes of which may be predicted based on observable characteristics of the transactors and of the exchange environment. The resulting hypotheses are tested using panel data on the pricing procedures using in Air Force engine procurement contracts. We conclude that the degree of contractual completeness chosen in practice reflects a desire by the parties to minimize the economic costs associated with contractual exchange.

Mitigating Contractual Hazards: Unilateral Options and Contract Length

In this article we consider the ways in which the desire for efficient, low-cost adaptation to change influences the tradeoff between the design and duration of long-term contractual relationships. We examine the distortions in contract terms occasioned by nonprice competition for natural gas in the presence of wellhead price regulation. Deviations from optimal contract incentives significantly raise the cost of being bound to long-term agreements and shorten the duration of contracts. The approach we adopt suggests a method for empirically assessing the efficiency of alternative contracting practices and legal standards.

Regulation and administered contracts revisited: Lessons from transaction-cost economics for public utility regulation

This article reexamines the administered contracts approach to regulation in light of recent empirical research that establishes the importance of transaction-costs in the organizational choice and design decisions. After reviewing the fundamentals of transaction cost reasoning and the franchise bidding-versus-regulation debate, the study surveys the empirical literature on franchise bidding, contracting, and vertical integration. The implications of transaction-cost theories for current policies toward pubic utility regulation and deregulation are also addressed.

The Efficiency Effects of Categorical Discrimination in the Insurance Industry

Recent public policy debate has focused concern on the equity dimensions of categorical discrimination based on sex, age, or race in insurance and similar markets. We consider the efficiency effects of such discrimination and establish that costless imperfect categorization always enhances efficiency. When categorization entails a nonnegligible resource cost, however, no unambiguous efficiency ranking of informational regimes is possible. When categorization is costless, we demonstrate that government, having no better information than market participants, can effect redistribution without assuming dictatorial control of the market, implying that a market equilibrium with costless categorization is potentially Pareto superior to one without it. When categorization is costly, however, the market may categorize when Pareto improvements are not possible.

Is Honesty the Best Policy? Curtailing Insurance Fraud through Optimal Incentive Contracts

An incentive contracting approach is used to characterize optimal contracts when insured individuals possess private information about their losses and are able to misrepresent permanently their loss magnitudes by engaging in the falsification of claims. We demonstrate that efficient agreements necessarily induce some falsification but that the extent of such claims inflation is mitigated partially by an indemnification schedule that overcompensates small losses while overpaying larger ones. The differential costs of generating insurance claims through falsification provide an avenue by which the heterogencous insureds can credibly signal their underlying losses and are exploited in an optimal contract to implement loss‐contingent insurance payments.

The efficiency of competitive equilibria in insurance markets with asymmetric information

Abstract This paper addresses the relationship between competitive equilibria and efficient allocations in an insurance market with asymmetric information. Using the definition of second-best efficiency proposed by Harris and Townsend (1981) for environments characterized by informational assmmetry, the efficiency properties of several proposed market equilibria are examined. We find an analogue to the First Optimality Theorem: A Miyazaki-Wilson equilibrium always results in a second best allocation.

Insurance Fraud and Optimal Claims Settlement Strategies

We examine the optimal claims settlement strategy for a liability insurer when claimants can permanently misrepresent their losses by engaging in costly claims falsification. In this environment, claims auditing is not a possible deterrent to fraud, and the settlement strategy consists of an indemnification profile that relates the insurance payment to the claimed amount of loss. The optimal indemnification profile is shown to involve systematic underpayment of claims at the margin as a means to deter loss exaggeration, with the extent of underpayment limited by expected litigation costs and potential bad‐faith claims. The key testable implication of the theory is that the extent of underpayment should be greater for classes of claims for which loss exaggeration is easier. Empirical analysis of insurance settlements for bodily injury liability in automobile accidents confirms this prediction. This suggests that liability insurers optimally choose claims payment strategies to lessen a claimants incentive to exaggerate losses.

Vertical Integration and the Strategic use of Private Information

This article presents a model of bilaterial monopoly in which one of the agents possesses private information about actual production costs. The strategic disclosure of this information is used as a bargaining tactic in an attempt to appropriate the quasi rents resulting from production. We examine the market transactions costs associated with the strategic use of private information. Vertical integration restructures private incentives so that the strategic use of information is minimized, thereby resulting in increased efficiency of production.

The Theory of Risk Classification

Risk Classification is the avenue through which insurance companies compete in order to reduce the cost of providing insurance contracts. While the underwriting incentives leading insurers to categorize customers according to risk status are straightforward, the social value of such activities is less clear. This chapter reviews the theoretical and empirical literature on risk classification, which demonstrates that the efficiency of permitting categorical discrimination in insurance contracting depends on the informational structure of the environment, and on whether insurance applicants become informed by the classification signal.

What do Facilitating Practices Facilitate? An Empirical Investigation of Most-Favored-Nation Clauses in Natural Gas Contracts

Long-term contracts often include most-favored-nation clauses (MFNs), which are nondiscrimination guarantees that obligate a buyer or seller to treat all trading partners symmetrically in pricing decisions. Recent theoretical work has shown that such clauses can facilitate tacit collusion by increasing the cost of selective price changes aimed at attracting new business. An alternative view is that MFNs serve to facilitate efficient price adjustment in extended exchange relationships. We test these competing hypotheses using data from long-term natural gas contracts, many of which employ MFNs. Our conclusion is that the pattern of MFN adoption, in conjunction with the structure of the nondiscrimination regions and the parallels with other nonstrategic price escalation provisions, lends strong support to the efficiency rationale.