Suppose an altruistic person, A, is willing to transfer resources to a second person, B, if B comes upon hard times. If B anticipates that A will act in this manner, B will save too little from both agents' point of view. This is the Samaritan's dilemma. The logic of the dilemma has been...

This paper models aid agencies as financial intermediaries that do not make a financial return to depositors, since the depositors' concern is to transfer resources to investor-beneficiaries. This leads to a significant problem of verification of the agencies' activities. One solution to this...

This paper develops a model of pricing and advertising in a matching environment with capacity constrained sellers. Sellers' expenditure on directly informative advertising attracts consumers only probabilistically. Consumers who happen to observe advertisements randomize over the advertised...

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.

This paper studies the international portfolio flows of US investors to examine the information structure of international equity markets. We use an empirical model of portfolio flows with both public and private information to extract measures of trades due to private information. We find that...

This paper reports experimental evidence on behaviour in an Ultimatum Game where responders have low structural information and feedback so that they have to learn the nature of the game during repeated play. The results lend support to the view that certain learning conditions are less...

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...

This is a short literature overview. (1) The literature demonstrates no coherent view on the nature of economic exchange and, in particular, provides no conventionally accepted, fully satisfactory explanation of the real effects of money. Recent developments in macroeconomics suggest a role for...

In a world with private information about the quality of technology we find that there are situations where relatively more technologically superior firm will license its technology but relatively less technologically superior firm will not license its technology. This finding is opposite to the...

Participants in a market, buyers and sellers, may need the service of an intermediary who will put them into contact and give them information about their potential trading partner. The intermediary chooses what price it will charge to each side to have access to its service. It also chooses...