Showing 1 - 10 of 46
Banks are optimally opaque institutions. They produce debt for use as a transaction medium (bank money), which requires that information about the backing assets – loans – not be revealed, so that bank money does not fluctuate in value, reducing the efficiency of trade. This need for opacity...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010784138
This paper studies the problem of incentivizing an agent in an innovation project when the progress of innovation is known only to the agent. I assume the success of innovation requires an intermediate breakthrough and a final breakthrough, with only the latter being observed by the principal....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011115654
We establish conditions under which an English auction for an indivisible risky asset has an efficient ex post equilibrium when the bidders are heterogeneous in both their exposures to, and their attitudes toward, the ensuing risk the asset will generate for the winning bidder. Each bidder's...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011199195
We showed in McLean and Postlewaite (2014) that when agents are informationally small, there exist small modifications to VCG mechanisms in interdependent value problems that restore incentive compatibility. This paper presents a two-stage mechanism that similarly restores incentive...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011193604
This paper demonstrates that a misspecified model of information processing interferes with long-run learning and offers an explanation for why individuals may continue to choose an inefficient action, despite sufficient public information to learn the true state. I consider a social learning...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010822879
We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments’ popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010822881
We develop an empirical methodology to study markets for services. These markets are typically organized as multi-attribute auctions in which buyers take into account seller's price as well as various characteristics, including quality. Our identification and estimation strategies exploit...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010822892
Asymmetric information is an important source of inefficiency when an asset (such as a firm) is transacted. The two main sources of this asymmetry are the unobserved idiosyncratic characteristics of the asset (such as future profitability) and unobserved idiosyncratic choices (like secret price...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010822908
We consider the dynamic pricing problem of a durable good monopolist with full commitment power, when a new version of the good is expected at some point in the future. The new version of the good is superior to the existing one, bringing a higher ow utility. If the arrival is a stationary...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010822911
We study an individual who faces a dynamic decision problem in which the process of information arrival is unobserved by the analyst. We elicit subjective information directly from choice behavior by deriving two utility representations of preferences over menus of acts. One representation...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10010822917