Economists argue that rich information environments and formal enforcement of contracts are necessary to prevent market failures when information asymmetries exist. We test for the necessity of formal enforcement to overcome the problems of asymmetric information by estimating the value of...

This paper studies the design of optimal contracts in dynamic environments where agents have private information that is persistent. In particular, I focus on a continuous time version of a benchmark insurance problem where a risk averse agent would like to borrow from a risk neutral lender to...

If an investor wants to form a portfolio of risky assets and can exert effort to collect information on the future value of these assets before he invests, which assets should he learn about? The best assets to acquire information about are ones the investor expects to hold. But the assets the...

We study the problem of a policymaker who seeks to set policy optimally in an economy where the true economic structure is unobserved, and he optimally learns from observations of the economy. This is a classic problem of learning and control, variants of which have been studied in the past, but...

This paper develops a model where firms make state-dependent decisions on both pricing and acquisition of information. It is shown that when information is not perfect, menu costs combined with the aggregate price level serving as an endogenous public signal generate rigidity in price setting...

This paper analyzes non-fundamental volatility and efficiency in a class of large games (including e.g. linear-quadratic beauty contests) that feature strategic interaction and endogenous information acquisition. We adopt the rational inattention approach to information acquisition but...

Information frictions play an important role in many theories of expectation formation. We use a survey experiment to generate direct evidence on how people select, acquire and process information. Participants can buy different information signals that could help them forecast future national...

The conduct of adjudication is often influenced by motions––requests made by litigants to modify the course of adjudication. The question studied in this article is why adjudication is designed so as to permit the use of motions. The answer developed is that litigants will naturally know a...

This paper presents a model of information and political regime change. If enough citizens act against a regime, it is overthrown. Citizens are imperfectly informed about how hard this will be and the regime can, at a cost, engage in propaganda so that at face-value it seems hard. This...