Incentive efficient risk sharing in a settlement mechanism

The purpose of this paper is to address a question concerning risk management in continuing, multi-party, contractual, clearing and settlement arrangements through which large-value payments are typically made. We are particularly interested in the issues of incentive compatibility when a third party possesses a private information concerning the riskiness of transfers being made. If a third party possesses private information that would be of value in determining how best to settle a payment, how does the exposure of that party to the settlement risk affect the quality of information that the party chooses to provide? In this paper, we address this question by analyzing a specific class of parametric environments of a schematic. formal, model of a settlement arrangement or a payment network. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.