We study pairwise trading mechanisms in the presence of private information and limited commitment, whereby either trader can walk away from a proposed trade when he learns the trading price. We show that when one trader's information is relevant for the other trader's value of the asset,...

A solution to marketplace information asymmetries is to have trading partners publicly rate each other post-transaction. Many have shown that these ratings are effective; we show that their effectiveness deteriorates over time. The problem is that ratings are prone to inflation, with raters...

Deferred Acceptance (DA), a widely implemented algorithm, is meant to improve allocations: under classical preferences, it induces preference-concordant rankings. However, recent evidence shows that—in both real, large-stakes applications and experiments—participants frequently play...

We explain how the common practice of size-discovery trade detracts from overall financial market efficiency. At each of a series of size-discovery sessions, traders report their desired trades, generating allocations of the asset and cash that rely on the most recent exchange price. Traders can...

We implement a new approach for the identification of news shocks about future technology. In a VAR featuring a measure of aggregate technology and several forward-looking variables, we identify the news shock as the shock orthogonal to technology innovations that best explains future variation...

We show how bundling, exclusivity and additional markets internalize fire sale and other pecuniary externalities. Ex ante competition can achieve a constrained efficient allocation. The solution can be put rather simply: create segregated market exchanges which specify prices in advance and...

We develop a structural model for bounding welfare effects of policies that alter the design of differentiated product markets when some consumers may be misinformed about product characteristics and inertia in consumer behavior reflects a mixture of latent preferences, information costs,...

In this paper, we study the optimal design of financial safety nets under limited private credit. We ask when it is optimal to restrict ex ante the set of investors that can receive public liquidity support ex post. When the government can commit, the optimal safety net covers all investors....

This paper analyzes the properties of the Taiwan mechanism, used for high school placement nationwide starting in 2014. In the Taiwan mechanism, points are deducted from an applicant's score with larger penalties for lower ranked choices. Deduction makes the mechanism a new hybrid between the...

We formulate and solve a range of dynamic models of constrained credit/insurance that allow for moral hazard and limited commitment. We compare them to full insurance and exogenously incomplete financial regimes (autarky, saving only, borrowing and lending in a single asset). We develop...