We study transactions that require investments before trading in a competitive market, when forward contracts fixing the transaction price are absent. We show that, despite the market being perfectly competitive and subject to arbitrarily little uncertainty, the inability to jointly determine...

There is ample evidence that emotions affect performance. Positive emotions can improve performance, while negative ones can diminish it. For example, the fears induced by the possibility of failure or of negative evaluations have physiological consequences (shaking, loss of concentration) that...

People may be surprised to notice certain regularities that hold in existing knowledge they have had for some time. That is, they may learn without getting new factual information. We argue that this can be partly explained by computational complexity. We show that, given a knowledge base,...