I develop a model of (individually rational) collective reality denial in groups, organizations and markets. Whether participants' tendencies toward wishful thinking reinforce or dampen each other is shown to hinge on a simple and novel mechanism. When an agent can expect to benefit from other's...

Recent models of monetary policy can have indeterminacy of equilibria. The indeterminacy property is often viewed as a difficulty of these models. We consider its significance using the learning approach to expectations formation by employing expectational stability as a robustness criterion for...

We show that direct investments by consumers without the use of financial intermediaries can efficiently allocate financial capital to firms seeking funding for production of a novel consumption good. In our setting, consumers are also investors, and their privately known consumption preferences...

The financial crisis of 2007-08 has underscored the importance of adverse selection in financial markets. This friction has been mostly neglected by macroeconomic models of financial frictions, however, which have focused almost exclusively on the effects of limited pledgeability. In this paper,...

According to the favorite-longshot bias observed in pari-mutuel betting, the final distribution of bets overestimates the winning chance of longshots. This Paper proposes an explanation of this bias based on late betting by small privately informed bettors. These bettors have an incentive to...

In many bilateral transactions, the seller fears being underpaid because its outside option is better known to the buyer. We rationalize a variety of observed contracts as solutions to such smart buyer problems. The key to these solutions is to grant the seller upside participation. In contrast,...

When agents hold non-common priors over an unverifiable state of nature which affects the outcome of their future actions, they have an incentive to bet on the outcome. We pose the following question: what are the limits on the agents' ability to realize gains from speculative bets when their...

Using a portfolio balance model of exchange rate determination, this paper develops a theoretical explanation of why central banks do not make precise announcements of their exchange rate targets. In foreign exchange markets, where it is common knowledge that the central bank intervenes to...