by Patrick Bolton, Mathias Dewatripont
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Product Description
Despite the vast research literature on topics relating to contract theory, only a few of the field's core ideas are covered in microeconomics textbooks. This long-awaited book fills the need for a comprehensive textbook on contract theory suitable for use at the graduate and advanced undergraduate levels. It covers the areas of agency theory, information economics, and organization theory, highlighting common themes and methodologies and presenting the main ideas in an accessible way. It also presents many applications in all areas of economics, especially labor economics, industrial organization, and corporate finance. The book emphasizes applications rather than general theorems while providing self-contained, intuitive treatment of the simple models analyzed. In this way, it can also serve as a reference for researchers interested in building contract-theoretic models in applied contexts.
The book covers all the major topics in contract theory taught in most graduate courses. It begins by discussing such basic ideas in incentive and information theory as screening, signaling, and moral hazard. Subsequent sections treat multilateral contracting with private information or hidden actions, covering auction theory, bilateral trade under private information, and the theory of the internal organization of firms; long-term contracts with private information or hidden actions; and incomplete contracts, the theory of ownership and control, and contracting with externalities. Each chapter ends with a guide to the relevant literature. Exercises appear in a separate chapter at the end of the book.
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Average Customer Review:
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
It's a good book!, 2008-05-02
This book is strongly recommended by our professor. I read some chapters and find it very clear. It does not over-use math, but empahsize the intuition of contract theory.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful:
 Excellent style, 2007-12-30
The authors arrange every detail of the subject logically and beautifully, great book to read and own.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
Comprehensive and well-writen, 2006-03-07
Probably the best book on Contract Theory I know. Very rigorous but with the posibility of a second non-mathematical reading. The conceptualization of most examples and motivations in terms of buyer-seller limits the scope to economists.
The book deeply analyzes topics usually casted aside by another handbooks.
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Exceptional, 2005-02-18
Despite more than 20 years of research there are not many books out there on contract theory. Laffont & Martimort and Salanie are perhaps the most widely read ones. What distinguishes this book from others is its comprehence coverage of modern contract theory: unlike the others, it allocates sizable portions on multilateral/multiagent/dynamic/incomplete frameworks, which until now only had to be learned by reading journal articles. This book picks out the most important and influential models and present them in depth, while not losing sight of other streams of literature. My only complaint is the book is not exactly user-friendly in some places. I had to spend quite a bit of time trying to figure out some missing steps in derivations. Usually these were resolved in second reading, so it is not a major issue (reminded me of reading quantum mechanics...) The benefit of having a single definitive source of modern contract theory (as opposed to flipping through hundreds of journal articles) is enormous for a student like me who is new to the subject. I suggest reading Salanie along with it. Salanie is more readable and short, and these two complement each other very well.
48 of 50 people found the following review helpful:
The Best Book on Contract Theory, 2005-01-08
We used selected parts of a preview version of this book at Carnegie Mellon in Fall 2004. This book is the best - better than Salanie's primer, which I am familar with in depth and also better than Laffont's Theory of Incentives, which I am familar with in parts.
The authors do a brilliant job of synthesizing hard to read Econometrica, JET, AER, QJE, articles down to key insights and managable proportions. They present results in a manner a graduate student can have a shot at understanding.
They discuss the expected topics - Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard; Screening, Signaling, Auctions. They do a particularly good job of explaining Adverse Selection and Moral Hazard in a dynamic framework.
This is hard material, certainly not trivial reading. You need some prior background in Microeconomic Theory of the level of Mas Collel / Reny and Jehle / Kreps and Game Theory of the level of Osbourne & Rubenstein / Fudenberg & Tirole. You also need to be a self-absorbed academic - ideally an enthusiastic and masochistic graduate student in Economics or closely related discipline. None of these books are of any damned use in the "real" world.
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