When potential shareholders cannot observe the business conditions of the firms, the latter desiring to acquire capital by an IPO and operating under less favourable business conditions have a strong incentive to appear more successful.

One of the most striking results in experimental economics is the ease with which market bubbles form in a laboratory setting and the difficulty of preventing them. This article re-examines bubble experiments in light of the results of an earlier series of market experiments that examine how...

The consequences of many policies are complicated and difficult to foresee. Those who are capable of providing information to policy makers often have a vested interest in the outcomes. This gives them an incentive to distort information to manipulate policy decisions. In this article we argue...

Many couples do not sign prenuptial agreements, even though this often leads to costly and inefficient litigation in case of divorce. In this paper we show that strategic reasons may prevent agents from signing a prenuptial agreement. Partners which have high productivity in marital activities...

A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...

This paper studies how the trade size and the historical sequence of trades affect bid-ask spreads, investors’ trading strategies, and the market maker’s learning process in a multi-period economy. First, we show that there is a nonzero cut-off size below which informed traders never buy or...

Among practitioners, inventory is often thought to be the root of all evil in operations management. The stock market hates it, the media abhors it, and managers have come to fear it. But high inventory levels can also be the result of strategic buying and high-availability strategies. The...

Professional experts offer advice with the objective of appearing well informed. Their ability is evaluated on the basis of the advice given and the realized state of the world. We model this situation as a reputational cheap-talk game with continuous signal, state, and ability type spaces....

We study a model in which two perfectly informed experts offer advice to a decision maker whose actions affect the welfare of all. Experts are biased and thus may wish to pull the decision maker in different directions and to different degrees. When the decision maker consults only a single...