We analyse the design of decision rules by a principal who faces an informed but biased agent and who is unable to commit to contingent transfers. The contracting problem reduces to a delegation problem in which the principal commits to a set of decisions from which the agent chooses his preferred one. We characterize the optimal delegation set and perform comparative statics on the principal's willingness to delegate and the agent's discretion. We also provide conditions for interval delegation to be optimal and show that they are satisfied when the agent's preferences are sufficiently aligned. Finally, we apply our results to the regulation of a privately informed monopolist and to the design of legislatives rules. Copyright 2008 The Review of Economic Studies Limited.

This paper compares centralized and decentralized coordination when managers are privately informed and communicate strategically. We consider a multi-divisional organization in which decisions must be adapted to local conditions but also coordinated with each other. Information about local conditions is dispersed and held by selfinterested division managers who communicate via cheap talk. The only available formal mechanism is the allocation of decision rights. We show that a higher need for coordination improves horizontal communication but worsens vertical communication. As a result, decentralization can dominate centralization even when coordination is extremely important relative to adaptation.

In a symmetric information voting model, an individual (politician) can influence voters' choices by strategically designing a policy experiment (public signal). We characterize the politician's optimal experiment. With a nonunanimous voting rule, she exploits voters' heterogeneity by designing an experiment with realizations targeting different winning coalitions. Consequently, under a simple-majority rule, a majority of voters might be strictly worse off due to the politician's influence. We characterize voters' preferences over electoral rules and provide conditions for a majority of voters to prefer a supermajority (or unanimity) voting rule, in order to induce the politician to supply a more informative experiment. (JEL D72, D83)

Abstract. We study the creation and propagation of exponential moments of solutions to the spatially homogeneous d-dimensional Boltzmann equation. In particular, when the collision kernel is of the form |v − v * | β b(cos(θ)) for β ∈ (0, 2] with cos(θ) = |v − v * | −1 (v − v * ) · σ and σ ∈ S d−1 , and assuming the classical cut-off condition b(cos(θ)) integrable in S d−1 , we prove that there exists a > 0 such that moments with weight exp(a min{t, 1}|v| β ) are finite for t > 0, where a only depends on the collision kernel and the initial mass and energy. We propose a novel method of proof based on a single differential inequality for the exponential moment with time-dependent coefficients.Mathematics Subject Classification (2000): 26D10, 35A23, 76P05, 82C40, 82D10