A firm can merge with one of n potential partners. The owner of each firm has private information about both his firm's stand-alone value and a component of the synergies that would be realized by the merger involving his firm. We characterize incentive-efficient mechanisms in two cases. First,...

The paper studies the equilibrium size of countries. Individuals in small countries have greater influence over the nature of political decision making while individuals in large countries have the advantage of more public goods and lower tax rates. The model implies that (i) there exists...

The quality of subjective performance evaluation is dependent on the incentive structures faced by evaluators, in particular on how they are monitored and themselves evaluated. Figure skating competitions provide a unique opportunity to study subjective evaluation. This paper develops a simple...

Researchers and state policymakers have hypothesized that the elderly may move to another state to avoid paying “death” (i.e., inheritance, estate, gift) taxes. This belief may be responsible for the recent revolution in state “death” tax policy whereby 30 states have eliminated their...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay to buy a risky asset. We relate this measure to a set of consumers' decisions that in theory should vary with attitude towards risk. We find that elicited...

Theories on the formation of information cascades have been tested in experimental settings in which players publicly announce binary expectations of a binary event based on private signals and preceding public announcements. We replicate and supplement the experimental data collection by...

This paper introduces a tractable, structural model of subjective beliefs. Since agents that plan for the future care about expected future utility flows, current felicity can be increased by believing that better outcomes are more likely. On the other hand, expectations that are biased towards...

We examine an economy in which the cost of consuming some goods can be reduced by making commitments to consumption levels that do not vary across states. For example, moral hazard and matching considerations may make it cheaper to produce housing services via owner-occupied than rented housing,...

This paper studies how the arrival of more precise information affects welfare in an economy with incomplete and differential information. We consider a single period, pure exchange economy with aggregate uncertainty in which agents show different attitudes towards risk: wealthy individuals are...

I argue in favor of a competitive screening approach for studying the question of coalition formation in exchange economies under asymmetric information. I obtain a new notion of core that refines Wilson (1978)'s coarse core. It is nonempty under the standard regularity conditions. I also...