A host of recent studies show that attention allocation has important economic consequences. This paper reports the first empirical test of a cost-benefit model of the endogenous allocation of attention. The model assumes that economic agents have finite mental processing speeds and cannot...

Prior research on quot;strategic votingquot; has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous,...

This paper introduces an emerging interdisciplinary research field, namely neuroeconomics, which uses the neuroscientific methods to investigate the neural systems supporting economically relevant behaviors. Traditional economic research is restricted to the level of describing decision...

Bargaining models ask how a surplus is split between two parties in bilateral monopoly. Much of real-world negotiation involves complications to the original split which may or may not increase the welfare of both parties. The parties must decide which complications to propose, how closely to...

This paper studies bank solvency crises due to macroeconomic shocks in a model where government is prone to bailout because of cronyism. Citizens can dismiss the government and overrule its decision if they believe that a bailout is not economically justified. The results are as follows. First,...

This paper describes optimal contracts in a dynamic costly state verification model with stochastic monitoring. An agent operates a risky project on behalf of a principal over several periods. Each period, the principal can observe the revenues from the project provided he incurs a fixed cost....

This article explains the roots of financial crises in one of the oldest and most fundamental problems of commercial law: hidden leverage. Common law courts wrestled with this problem for centuries and developed a time - tested solution: the doctrine of secret liens. If the debtor becomes...

From a financial economic perspective, the governing condition of a meritorious civil action is the uncertainty of outcome. Expectation and outcome deviate, and the spread is the measure of uncertainty (or variance). During litigation each party has an option to settle or select trial. The...

We build a model with a wide variety of players (liquidity traders, speculators, market makers, financial intermediaries, borrowers and lenders). The paper derives the individual and aggregate behavior of participants who are involved in financial interchanges taking into consideration the...

The hedge fund (HF) industry has experienced dramatic changes since late 2007. Before then, HF managers faced little or no competition because of affluent capital in the market. Since then, however, large redemption because of the financial crisis has forced managers to compete for capital,...