Essays on dynamic games and mechanism design

Abstract

The dissertation considers three topics in dynamic games and mechanism design. In both problems, asymmetric information causes inefficiency in production and allocation. The first chapter considers the inefficiency from the principal's inability to observes the agent's effort or cost of effort, and explores its implication to the principal's response to the combination of the output and the signal about the cost of effort. For example, the principal may punish the agent more harshly for low output when signals suggest that cost of effort is high when the effort is of high value for the principal. This chapter also classifies the long-run behavior of the relationship between the principal and the agent. Depending on whether the agent is strictly risk-averse and whether he is protected by limited liability, the state of the relationship may or may not converge to a stationary state and the stationary state may nor may not depend on the initial condition. The second chapter considers the re-allocation of assets among entrepreneurs with different matching qualities, which contributes to the growth of the whole economy. Due to reasons that are not explicitly modeled, assets are not automatically allocated to entrepreneurs who are best at operating them from the beginning, and this inefficiency is combined with inefficiency in the asset market and potential imperfection of labor contracting. When asset re-allocation can become a main source of economic growth, this chapter argues that imperfection in the labor contracting environment may boost the economic growth. The third chapter assumes that the agent's output is contractible but he can privately acquire more information about his cost of production prior to contracting. Compared to the optimal screening contract, the principal's contract in this case must not only induce the agent to "tell the truth", but also to give the agent the incentive to acquire appropriate amount of information. This may create distortion of allocation to the most efficient type and whether this happens is related to the marginal loss incurred by the principal from the cost of information acquisition.