This paper presents a non-technical overview of the recent investment literature with a special emphasis on the connection between technological progress and the investment decision. First of all, we acknowledge that some dramatic advances have been made in the 1990s in understanding and...

We show that every sequential screening model is equivalent to a standard text book static screening model. We use this result and apply well-established techniques from static screening to obtain solutions for classes of sequential screening models for which standard sequential screening...

In markets with quality unobservable to buyers, third-party certification is often the only instrument to increase transparency. While both sellers and buyers have a demand for certification, its role differs fundamentally: sellers use it for signaling, buyers use it for inspection. Seller...

Uncertainty in election outcomes generates politically induced regulatory risk. For monopoly regulation, political parties' risk attitudes towards such risk depend on a fluctuation effect that hurts both parties and an output-expansion effect that benefits at least one party. Irrespective of the...

We study an organization with a top management (principal) and multiple subunits (agents) with private information that determine the organization's aggregate efficiency. Under centralization, eliciting the agents' private information may induce the principal to manipulate aggregate information,...