We provide a characterization of participants' behavior in a contest or tournament where the marginal productivity of effort varies across contestants and individual productivity is private information. We then consider the optimal design of such a contest. <p>We first analyze contestant behavior...</p>

This paper shows new properties about the equilibria of a stationary OG economy by establishing a connection between its stationary equilibria and those of a finite economy, with and without extrinsic uncertainty. Specifically, it shows the countability and local uniqueness with respect to the...

A speculative security is an asset whose payoff depends in part on a random shock uncorrelated with economic fundamentals (a sunspot) about which some traders have superior information. In this paper we show that agents may find it desirable to trade such a security in spite of the fact that it...

This paper analyzes the welfare effects of permitting firms to negotiate contractually the right to allow corporate insiders to trade shares in the firm on private information. A computational framework is employed to (i) analyze formally the effects of insider trading on managerial investment...

We analyze an infinite horizon model where a seller who owns an indivisible unit of a good for sale has incomplete information about the state of the world that determines not only the demand she faces but also her own valuation for the good. Over time, she randomly meets potential buyers who...

A simple example shows that although non-convexities might prevent the existence of a fully revealing rational expectations equilibrium, they need not prevent the existence of a non-informative one. Indeed, the economy in this example does not possess any fully revealing equilibria, but does...

The paper investigates the nature of market failure in a dynamic version of Akerlof (1970) where identical cohorts of a durable good enter the market over time. In the dynamic model, equilibria with qualitatively different properties emerge. Typically, in equilibria of the dynamic model, sellers...