This survey paper starts from the basic, and intuitive, assumption that judges are human and as such, can be modeled in the same fashion we model politicians, activists, managers: driven by well-defined preferences, behaving in a purposive and forward-looking fashion. We explore, then, the role...

The lack of flexibility in public procurement design and implementation reflects public agents' political risk adaptation to limit hazards from opportunistic third parties - political opponents, competitors, interest groups - while externalizing the associated adaptation costs to the public at...

This paper discusses the fundamental underpinnings and some implications of transaction cost regulation (TCR), a framework to analyze the interaction between governments and investors fundamentally, but not exclusively, in utility industries. TCR sees regulation as the governance structure of...

Many argue that home bias arises because home investors can predict home asset payoffs more accurately than foreigners can. But why doesn't global information access eliminate this asymmetry? We model investors, endowed with a small home information advantage, who choose what information to...

If an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests, which assets should he learn about? The best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold. But the assets the...

We use a large data set of deductible choices in auto insurance contracts to estimate the distribution of risk preferences in our sample. To do so, we develop a structural econometric model, which accounts for adverse selection by allowing for unobserved heterogeneity in both risk (probability...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in macro models with heterogeneity in information and complementarity in actions. These models deliver promising positive properties, such as heightened inertia and volatility. But they also raise important normative questions, such as whether...

Synchronized expansions and contractions across sectors define business cycles. Yet synchronization is puzzling because productivity across sectors exhibits weak correlation. While previous work examined production complementarity, our analysis explores complementarity in information...