We study firms’ incentives to acquire costly information in booms and recessions to understand the role of endogenous information in explaining business cycles. We find that when the economy has been in a boom in the previous period, and firms enter the current period with an optimistic...

During the 19th century, poor and orphan Swedish children were boarded out. The foster-parents' compensation was determined in English auctions. Some children were re-auctioned. We use historical data from such auctions to study whether informational asymmetry and possibly adverse selection...

We present a model of financial contracting in the presence of asymmetric information between entrepreneur and investor. Either liquidation threat or governance control can be used to protect investor’s interests against expropriation risk. The two parties first agree to a financial...

We consider Bayesian incentive compatible and individually rational mechanisms for resolving conflicts between two agents who are uncertain about each other's fighting potential. We model the default option of outright conflict as a probabilistic contest. Examples of such contests may be...

We consider a leader and a subordinate he appoints who engage in team production. The public observes the organization’s performance, but is unable to determine the separate contributions of the leader and of the subordinate. The leader may therefore claim credit for the good work of his...

We consider a two-player contest for a prize of common but uncertain value. We show that less resources are spent in equilibrium if one party is privately informed about the value of the prize than if either both agents are informed or neither agent is informed. Furthermore, the uninformed agent...

We study an asymmetric information model in which two firms are active on a market where buyers only observe the average quality supplied. Quantities and cost structures are exogenously given and firms compete in quality. Before choosing their qualities, they bargain over a perfectly enforcable...

Would you go to the dentist more often if it were free? Observational data is here used to analyze the impact of full-coverage insurance on dental care utilization using different identification strategies. The challenge of assessing the bite of moral hazard without an experimental study design...

Two firms produce different qualities at possibly different, constant marginal costs. They compete in quantities on a market where buyers only observe the average quality supplied. The model is a generalization of the standard Cournot duopoly, which corresponds to the special case where the two...

Micro data from a dental insurance natural experiment is used to analyze why agents opt out of insurance. The purpose is to relate the dropout decision to new information on risk, acquired by the policy holder and the insurer. The results show that agents tend to leave the insurance when...