Aggregation with non-convex labor supply, unobservable effort, and efficiency wages of the no-shirking type

The purpose of this note is to explore the problem of non-convex labor supply decision in an economy with imperfect observability of work effort, and the need to use effciency wages to prevent shirking as in Shapiro and Stiglitz 1984. In addition, the paper and explicitly performs the aggregation presented in Vasilev 2017 without a formal proof, and thus provide - starting from micto-foundations - the derivation of the expected utility functions used for the aggregate household. We show how lotteries as in Rogerson 1988 can be used to convexify consumption sets, and aggregate over individual preferences. With a discrete labor supply decisions, the elasticity of aggregate labor supply increases from unity to infinity.

The Role of Observability in Futures Markets

Allaz (1992) and Allaz and Vila (1993) show that in an oligopolistic industry the introduction of a futures market that operates prior to the spot market induces more competitive outcomes. Hughes and Kao (1997) show that this result presumes that firms' future positions are perfectly observed, and that when firms' positions are not observed the Cournot outcome arises. We study an alternative formulation of observability, where the behavior of participants in the futures market is explicitly analyzed, and show that this approach leads to different results. Imperfect observability induces more competitive outcomes than Allaz and Vila's model.