Study reveals competitive markets may be inefficient due to moral hazard
Competitive equilibria in economies with moral hazard can be inefficient, but not always. When preferences are nonseparable, the equilibrium is inefficient. However, most common preference structures are weakly separable, leading to constrained optimal competitive equilibria. Small deviations from weak separability can still result in optimal outcomes. This challenges the belief that competitive equilibria with private information are always inefficient.