More then just a textbook, A Theory of Incentives in Procurement and Regulation will guide economists' research on regulation for years to come. It makes a difficult and large literature of the new regulatory economics accessible to the average graduate student, while offering insights into the theoretical ideas and stratagems not available elsewhere. Based on their pathbreaking work in the application of principal-agent theory to questions of regulation, Laffont and Tirole develop a synthetic approach, with a particular, though not exclusive, focus on the regulation of natural monopolies such as military contractors, utility companies, and transportation authorities.

The book's clear and logical organization begins with an introduction that summarizes regulatory practices, recounts the history of thought that led to the emergence of the new regulatory economics, sets up the basic structure of the model, and previews the economic questions tackled in the next seventeen chapters. The structure of the model developed in the introductory chapter remains the same throughout subsequent chapters, ensuring both stability and consistency. The concluding chapter discusses important areas for future work in regulatory economics. Each chapter opens with a discussion of the economic issues, an informal description of the applicable model, and an overview of the results and intuition. It then develops the formal analysis, including sufficient explanations for those with little training in information economics or game theory. Bibliographic notes provide a historical perspective of developments in the area and a description of complementary research. Detailed proofs are given of all major conclusions, making the book valuable as a source of modern research techniques. There is a large set of review problems at the end of the book.

Game Theory

by Drew Fudenberg and Jean Tirole

Published 29 August 1991
This advanced text introduces the principles of noncooperative game theory in a direct and uncomplicated style that will acquaint students with the broad spectrum of the field while highlighting and explaining what they need to know at any given point.

This advanced text introduces the principles of noncooperative game theory—including strategic form games, Nash equilibria, subgame perfection, repeated games, and games of incomplete information—in a direct and uncomplicated style that will acquaint students with the broad spectrum of the field while highlighting and explaining what they need to know at any given point. The analytic material is accompanied by many applications, examples, and exercises. The theory of noncooperative games studies the behavior of agents in any situation where each agent's optimal choice may depend on a forecast of the opponents' choices. "Noncooperative" refers to choices that are based on the participant's perceived selfinterest. Although game theory has been applied to many fields, Fudenberg and Tirole focus on the kinds of game theory that have been most useful in the study of economic problems. They also include some applications to political science. The fourteen chapters are grouped in parts that cover static games of complete information, dynamic games of complete information, static games of incomplete information, dynamic games of incomplete information, and advanced topics.


Why do financial institutions, industrial companies, and households hold low-yielding money balances, Treasury bills, and other liquid assets? When and to what extent can the state and international financial markets make up for a shortage of liquid assets, allowing agents to save and share risk more effectively? These questions are at the center of all financial crises, including the current global one. In Inside and Outside Liquidity, leading economists Bengt Holmstroem and Jean Tirole offer an original, unified perspective on these questions. In a slight, but important, departure from the standard theory of finance, they show how imperfect pledgeability of corporate income leads to a demand for as well as a shortage of liquidity with interesting implications for the pricing of assets, investment decisions, and liquidity management. The government has an active role to play in improving risk-sharing between consumers with limited commitment power and firms dealing with the high costs of potential liquidity shortages. In this perspective, private risk-sharing is always imperfect and may lead to financial crises that can be alleviated through government interventions.

This text by one of Europe's leading economists covers a wide variety ofpublic economics issues with great clarity and precision, illustrating them with awealth of carefully-chosen examples and problems.Starting from theories of generalequilibrium analysis, Laffont considers issues of market failure, collectivedecisionmaking, and distributional equity. He analyzes the important informationaland motivational problems involved in planning solutions for market failures, andprovides a rigorous justification for the theoretical foundations of publiceconomics.Topics include the theories of externalities, public goods, collectivechoice, consumer surplus, cost-benefit analysis and/or theory of the second best, incomplete markets, and nonconvexities. For each Laffont begins with the classicalfoundations, moves on to consider the topic within a simple model of the economy, and concludes by integrating results from recent journal articles into this simpleframework. In this way students are led to understand the classical tradition in thecontext of modern general equilibrium theory.The book concludes with eight problemswith solutions, each interesting and rich enough to be considered a case study, andnine exercises without solutions; together they provide an excellent review ofmaterial covered in the text. The basic approach in each problem is to set up ageneral equilibrium model, discover the market failure by calculating the unfetteredequilibrium, and develop an explicit planning solution.Jean-Jacques Laffont isProfessor of Economics at the University of Social Sciences at Toulouse.Fundamentals of Economics may be used in either an advanced graduate-level course inpublic economics or in conjunction with a second volume forthcoming by the sameauthor in a course in advanced microeconomics.

The Economics of Uncertainty and Information may be used in conjunction with Loffont's Fundamentals of Economics in an advanced course in microeconomics. Both texts provide a thorough account of modern thinking on the subject and a wealth of carefully chosen examples and problems. The first four chapters of The Economics of Uncertainty and Information summarize the essential tools of the analysis of uncertainty and information: the theory of individual behavior under uncertainty, the measures of risk aversion and the measures of risk, and the notions of certainty equivalence and information structure. Subsequent chapters introduce the theory of contingent markets, model systems of incomplete markets and define the concept of a perfect foresight equilibrium, cover two fundamental institutions for sharing risk - the stock market and insurance, show how the transmission of information by prices renders information structures endogenous, and study personalized exchange with asymmetric information. Each chapter concludes with a list of suggested readings and with auxiliary sections which go into more detail about certain aspects of the subject. The book concludes with review problems and exercises.