This paper examines the relationship between debt contract and the process of resolving financial distress, through either debt restructuring or bankruptcy procedure. It effectively justifies the popularity of the standard debt contract by demonstrating that the standard debt contract is the...

The main goal of this paper is to analyze the nature of long-term liquidity contracts that arise between lenders and borrowers in the absence of perfect enforceability and when both parties are financially constrained. We study an infinite horizon dynamic contracting model between a borrower and...

This paper studies the benefits of participation in micro finance programs, and shows that although membership in these programs is an effective instrument in combating inter-seasonal consumption differences, there is a threshold level of length of participation beyond which benefits begin to...

In most of the land tenancy literature the type of contract is exogenous. Also even though these contracts vary a lot among farms, between regions and over time, the theoretical literature has not always acknowledged this idiosyncrasy. Building on the strategic bargaining theory initiated by...

Recent advances in evolutionary game theory have employed stochastic processes of noise in decisionmaking to select in favor of certain equilibria in coordination games. Noisy decisionmaking is justified on bounded rationality grounds, and consequently the sources of noise are left unmodelled....

A very general result on continuous linear representability of binary relations on topological vector spaces is presented. Applications of this result include individual decision making under uncertainty, i.e. expected utility theory and collective decision making, in particular, utilitaristic...

A preference for negative reciprocity is an important part of the human emotional repertoire. We model its role in sustaining cooperative behavior but highlight an intrinsic free-rider problem: the fitness benefits of negative reciprocity are dispersed throughout the entire group, but the...

We study an equilibrium sequential search model where buyers have potentially downward-sloping demand and with bilateral heterogeneity in buyers' search costs and firms' production costs. We show that downward- sloping demand and heterogeneity in production costs are necessary to ensure price...

We construct a model with private information in which consumers write dynamic contracts with financial intermediaries. A role for money arises due to random limited participation of consumers in the financial market. Without defection constraints, a Friedman rule is optimal, the mean and...

The literary source of the main ideas in Aumann's article ``Backward Induction and Common Knowledge of Rationality" is exposed and analyzed. The primordial archetypal images that underlie both this literary source and Aumann's work are delineated and are used to explain the great emotive impact...