We examine a service market with two frictions: search is required to obtain price quotes, and insurance coverage for the service reduces household search effort. While fewer draws from a price distribution will directly raise a household's average price, the indirect effect of reduced search on price competition has a much greater impact, accounting for at least 89 percent of increased average expenditures. In this environment, a monopolist insurer will exacerbate the moral hazard by offering full insurance. A competitive insurance market typically results in partial insurance and significant price dispersion, yet a second-best contract would offer even less insurance coverage.
This study examines the behavior of simple n-person bargaining problems under pre-donations where the Kalai-Smorodinsky (KS) solution is operant. Predonations are a unilateral commitment to transfer a portion of one's utility to someone else, and are used to distort the bargaining set and thereby influence the bargaining solution. In equilibrium, these pre-donations are Pareto-improving over the undistorted solution; moreover, when the agents' preferences are sufficiently distinct, the equilibrium solution coincides with the concessionary division rule.
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