The Credit Rating Market - Options for Appropriate Regulation
Abstract
The principal agent problem is one of the major issues of the credit rating agency market. Is it possible to solve the prevailing incentive problem of the market and contemporaneously satisfy the reputation demand of the investors? This paper presents an option for regulating the credit rating agency market more effectively. The market shall be coordinated through a central allocation office, which is acting as a mediator between both contractual parties. The paper develops a game theoretical approach that considers reputation as one of the most important aspects within the market. After analysing the status quo two policy options are discussed on a game theoretical basis. The main result is that the incorporation of a mediator, which awards the contracts based on a lottery drawing, would help to solve conflicts of interests. The incentive to inflate ratings decreases significantly. Moreover, rating shopping option becomes impossible. Two possible positive side effects for smaller CRAs and new incumbents are the increase of market share as well as reputation. Therefore, the market competition should be affected positively, too.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena in its series Global Financial Markets Working Paper Series with number 2012-39.Length:
Date of creation: 2012
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:hlj:hljwrp:39-2012
Contact details of provider:
Web page: http://www.gfinm.de
Related research
Keywords: credit rating agencies; regulation; reputation; rating inflation; rating shopping;Find related papers by JEL classification:
- G24 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Investment Banking; Venture Capital; Brokerage
- G28 - Financial Economics - - Financial Institutions and Services - - - Government Policy and Regulation
- D43 - Microeconomics - - Market Structure and Pricing - - - Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection
- D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:
- NEP-ALL-2012-12-06 (All new papers)
- NEP-REG-2012-12-06 (Regulation)
References
References listed on IDEASPlease report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
- Antoine Faure-Grimaud & Eloïc Peyrache & Lucía Quesada, 2009.
"The ownership of ratings,"
RAND Journal of Economics,
RAND Corporation, vol. 40(2), pages 234-257.
- Faure-Grimaud, Antoine & Peyrache, Eloïc & Quesada, Lucía, 2005. "The Ownership of Ratings," CEPR Discussion Papers 5432, C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers.
- Mathis, Jérôme & McAndrews, James & Rochet, Jean-Charles, 2009. "Rating the raters: Are reputation concerns powerful enough to discipline rating agencies?," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 56(5), pages 657-674, July.
- Patrick Bolton & Xavier Freixas & Joel Shapiro, 2012.
"The Credit Ratings Game,"
Journal of Finance,
American Finance Association, vol. 67(1), pages 85-112, 02.
- Patrick Bolton & Xavier Freixas & Joel Shapiro, 2009. "The Credit Ratings Game," NBER Working Papers 14712, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
- Patrick Bolton & Xavier Freixas & Joel Shapiro, 2010. "The credit ratings game," Economics Working Papers 1221, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
- Patrick Bolton & Xavier Freixas & Joel Shapiro, 2010. "The Credit Ratings Game," Working Papers 468, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics.
- Patrick Bolton & Xavier Freixas & Joel Shapiro, 2009. "The credit ratings game," Economics Working Papers 1149, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
- Bo Becker & Todd Milbourn, 2010.
"How did increased competition affect credit ratings?,"
NBER Working Papers
16404, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
- Becker, Bo & Milbourn, Todd, 2011. "How did increased competition affect credit ratings?," Journal of Financial Economics, Elsevier, vol. 101(3), pages 493-514, September.
- Heski Bar-Isaac & Joel Shapiro, 2011. "Credit Ratings Accuracy and Analyst Incentives," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 101(3), pages 120-24, May.
- Lawrence J. White, 2010. "Markets: The Credit Rating Agencies," Journal of Economic Perspectives, American Economic Association, vol. 24(2), pages 211-26, Spring.
Citations
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hlj:hljwrp:39-2012For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Christian Fahrholz).
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

