Abebe Tolla

The Economics of Contracting Public Project Abebe Tolla

This book gives insights to answer the problem that faces public organization in delegating their mega projects to their agents in three level of hierarchical model. Taking three players: the politician, the bureaucrat and the contractor, I developed a three level hierarchical adverse selection model. In the model the bureaucrat is an agent to the politician and the contractor in turn is also an agent to the bureaucrat. Each player in the game has their own strategies that enable them to determine their payoffs. Basically the players apply the technique of backward induction either to deal with the project work or not. The same process also helps us to determine the outcome (Nash equilibrium) of the game. In this game players have a complete information of their types but have a blurt information about the other players type. In the principal agent model the prevalent problem is the problem of information asymmetry between the principal and his/her agent. The agent knows his/her type for sure but the principal knows the true types of his/her agent with certain probabilities. This is the adverse selection problem that should be mitigated somehow.