A number of portfolio strategies followed by practitioners are dominated because they are incompletely diversified over time. The Payoff Distribution Pricing Model is used to compute the cost of following undiversified strategies. Simple numerical examples illustrate the technique, and...

A restriction to nonnegative wealth is sufficient to preclude all arbitrage opportunities in financial models that have risk neutral probabilities that are valid for all simple strategies. Imposing nonnegative wealth does not constrain agents from making the choice they would make under the...

The Modigliani and Miller propositions on the irrelevancy of capital structure and dividends are shown to be valid in a large class of models with asymmetric information. The main assumption is that managerial compensation is chosen optimally. This differs from most recent papers on this topic,...

This note examines the effect of changes in risk aversion on the optimal portfolio choice in a complete market. It is shown that an agent who is less risk averse in the Pratt (1964) sense than another will choose a portfolio whose payoff is distributed as the other's payoff plus a nonnegative...

We consider the provision of an optimal warranty in a continuous-time model with two-sided moral hazard. The optimal warranty must balance the producer's durability incentive and the buyer's maintenance incentive. Too little warranty protection gives the producer too much incentive to produce...

We compare trading in a market with receiving some particular consumption bundle, given increasing state-independent preferences and complete markets. The analysis focuses on the distributional price of the particular bundle. The distributional price is the price of the cheapest...

This paper shows that moment inequality tests that are asymptotically similar on the boundary of the null hypothesis exist, but have poor power. Hence, existing tests in the literature, which are asymptotically non-similar on the boundary, are not deficient. The results are obtained by first...

We study a dynamic buyer-seller problem in which the good is information and there are no property rights. The potential buyer is reluctant to pay for information whose value to him is uncertain, but the seller cannot credibly convey its value to the buyer without disclosing the information...

We investigate the role of market transparency in repeated first-price auctions. We consider a setting with private and independent values across bidders. The values are assumed to be perfectly persistent over time. We analyze the first-price auction under three distinct disclosure regimes...

This paper brings mechanism design to the study of conflict resolution in international relations. We determine when and how unmediated communication and mediation reduce the ex ante probability of conflict, in a simple game where conflict is due to asymmetric information. Unmediated...