This paper introduces signaling in a standard market microstructure model so as to explore the economic circumstances under which hype and dump manipulation can be an equilibrium outcome.  We consider a discrete time, multi-period model with stages of signaling and asset trading.  A single...

One of the core goals of a universal health care system is to eliminate discrimination on the basis of socioeconomic status.  We test for discrimination using patient waiting times for non-emergency treatment in public hospitals.  Waiting time should reflect patients' clinical need with...

Economists have traditionally assumed that individual behavior is motivated exclusively by extrinsic incentives.  Social physchologists, in contrast, stress that intrinsic motivations are also important.  In recent work, economic theorists have started to build psychological factors, like...

Suppliers who are better informed than purchasers, such as physicians treating insured patients, often have discretion over what to provide. This paper shows how, when the purchaser observes what is supplied but neither recipient type nor the actual cost incurred, optimal provision differs from...

The trend towards Internet self-regulation is driven both by governments that feel reluctant to invest in direct regulation (because of freedom of speech concerns or high costs of monitoring and enforcement) and by the industry that is under the threat of rising public concerns over content...

Fixed price payments for treatment of patients with a specified diagnosis are widespread in both US Medicare and the British NHS even though there are substantial variations in the cost of treatment. Theory suggests that, when there is asymmetric information about those costs, total payment can...

Incentive contracts for gatekeepers who control patient access to specialist medical services provide too weak incentives to investigate cost further when expected cost of treatment is greater than benefit. Making gatekeepers residual claimants with a fixed fee from which treatment costs must be...

This paper is largely motivated by the empirical observation that GP visits per person under the NHS have increased in England since the mid-1970s, while list sizes have decreased over the same period  A hypothesis consistent with this observation is that larger list sizes are associated with...

We study the implications of conformism among analysts in a CARA Gaussian model of the market for a risky asset, where a trader's information is a message sent by an analyst.  Conformism increases the weight of the public information in the messages, decreasing their informativeness.  More...

It is often taken as axiomatic that investors prefer high levels of regulation.  Yet companies have increasingly chosen to list on stock exchanges with lower regulatory requirements.  In this paper we analyse whether investors value high regulatory standards for quoted companies.  We use the...