In uniform-price auctions of shares there exist collusive equilibria in which bidders capture the entire surplus from the auction as well as competitive equilibria in which the auctioneer captures the entire surplus from the auction. We provide experimental evidence that, in uniform-price...

This paper considers lending to finance projects in a setting where repayment enforcement appears impossible. The loan was illegal and thus legally unenforceable. Creditors were incapable of applying private coercion to force repayment. Borrowers lacked both collateral and reputation capital....

We model and experimentally examine the board structure-performance relationship. We examine single-tiered boards, two-tiered boards, insider-controlled boards and outsider-controlled boards. We find that even insider-controlled boards frequently adopt institutionally preferred rather than...

We posit that screening IPOs requires specialized labor which is in fixed supply. A sudden increase in demand for IPO financing increases the compensation of IPO screening labor. This results in reduced screening, encouraging sub-marginal firms to enter the IPO market, further fueling the demand...

This paper embeds security design in a model of evolutionary learning. We consider a competitive and perfect financial market where agents, as in Allen and Gale (1988), have heterogeneous valuations for cash flows. Our point of departure is that, instead of assuming that agents are endowed with...

This article models the decisions of a regulated utility that has the option of meeting excess demand by buying power on the spot markets. The risk associated with the cost of meeting excess consumer demand can be hedged by trading in a financial derivatives market. We show that the optimal...

In this paper, we develop a dynamic model of institutional share dumping surrounding control events. Institutional investors sometimes dump shares, despite trading losses, in order to manipulate share prices and trigger activism by “relationship” investors. These institutional investors are...