NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH
NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH

Randomization with Asymmetric Information

Richard J. Arnott, Joseph E. Stiglitz

NBER Working Paper No. 2507*
Issued in February 1988

It is by now well-known that, in the presence of moral hazard or adverse selection, randomization of insurance premia and benefits may be Pareto efficient. This paper: i) provides a typology of the various forms that randomization may take; ii) derives necessary and/or sufficient conditions for the desirability of these various forms of randomization; iii) obtains some simple characterization theorems of the efficient random policies; iv) gives some intuition behind the results; and v) considers why randomization appears to occur less often in practice than the theory suggests it should.

*Published: Rand Journal of Economics, vol 19, Fall 1988, pp344-362.

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