Do asset prices aggregate investors’ private information about the ability of financial analysts? We show that as financial analysts become reputable, the market can get trapped: Investors optimally choose to ignore their private information, and blindly follow analyst recommendations. As time...

This paper analyzes the impact of market structure on career concerns. Effort increases the probability that a skilled agent achieves a one-time breakthrough. Wages are based on assessed ability and on expected output. For any wage, the agent works too little, too late. Under short-term...

We enrich a simple two-person bargaining model by introducing "behavioral types" who concede more slowly than does the average person in the economy. The presence of behavioral types profoundly influences the choices of optimizing types. In equilibrium, concessions are calculated to induce...

This paper develops a model of career concerns. The worker's skill is revealed through output, wage is based on expected output, and so on assessed ability. Specifically, effort increases the probability that a skilled worker achieves a one-time breakthrough. Effort levels at different times are...

The payments system of a modern economy is a peculiar mix of technological and institutional factors. Trade takes time and involves some form of money or credit. Going to the bank or arranging credits is expensive. Baumol (1952) and Tobin (1956) address the costs of transactions. However both...

In a generic finite normal form game with 2(alpha) + 1 Nash equilibria, at least alpha of the equilibria are nondegenerate mixed strategy equilibria (that is, they involve randomization by some players).

History has seen many examples of the lone man ñ like Christ, Luther, Gandhi, or Hitler -- who without initial wealth or position, succeeds in changing the behavior of an entire society, for good or for ill. Whence comes this power. No doubt such leaders have possessed extraordinary ability,...

In this paper, I examine whether and how warranties serve as signals of product quality in an environment where there are opportunities for consumer moral hazard. My model is very similar to Grossman's. A risk neutral monopolist produced a good of fixed and exogenous quality. This product is...

The set of possible outcomes of a strongly ordinal bimatrix game is studied by imbedding each pair of possible payoffs as a point on the standard two-dimensional integral lattice. In particular, we count the number of different Pareto optimal sets of each cardinality; we establish asymptotic...