We use a model with agency frictions to analyze the structure of a dealer market that faces competition from a crossing network. Traders are privately informed about their types (e.g. their portfolios), which is something the dealer must take into account when engaging his counterparties....

stock market crash on hedging strategies by portfolio insurers, which dictated selling stocks as soon as prices fell. The fact that the practice of buying and selling stocks as portfolio insurance has virtually disappeared since then has given many comfort that a replay of the 1987 crash, when...

We examine the design of nonlinear prices by a multiproduct monopolist who serves customers with multidimensional but correlated types. We show that the monopoly can exploit the correlations between consumers' types to design pricing mechanisms that fully extract the surplus from each consumer....

Internationally, there is no consensus concerning the legal and moral judgment of prostitution. Nevertheless, there is an overwhelming agreement on the need to fight sexual slavery. We analyze how a law - introduced to punish clients of commercial sex services - affects market outcomes. More...

We study a dynamic model of monopolistic provision of commitment devices to sophisticated, Strotzian decision makers. We allow for unobservable heterogeneity at the contracting stage in the agents' preferences for commitment vs. flexibility. The first-best contracts under complete information...

Within the setting of two simple two-person coordinationgames the formation of subjective strategies is observed experimentally.Though the structure of the game is unknown playersuse their actions in order to coordinate on a specific equilibrium.Strategies enable them to interpret the...

This paper focuses on egocentric biases in financial decisions. Subjects first designa portfolio, whereby each combination of assets yields the same expected returnand variance of returns. They are then confronted with two alternative portfolios;the average portfolio and the portfolio of one’s...

Using a new experimental design, we compare how subjects form beliefs in an investor-client setup under varying degrees of liability. Our results reflect the importance of social preferences when making investment decisions for others. We show that when investors have no liability, those with...

We study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...

We examine the additivity of stock-market expectations over different time intervals. When asked about a ten-year interval, survey respondents expect a stock-price change that is not equal to, but closer to zero than, the sum of their expectations over two shorter time intervals that cover the...