Obtaining information about changes in market conditions is vital for the survival of the firms operating in a changing environment. In this paper, we offer a theory of information flows in a setting in which the principal faces a project choice and needs to induce the agent, who is responsible...

Public service motivation is often considered as an argument for low- powered incentive schemes in the public sector. In this paper, we characterize the optimal contract between a public regulator and an altruistic agent according to the degree of public service motivation, when the type of the...

Many consumers make poor financial choices and older adults are particularly vulnerable to such errors. About half of the population between ages 80 and 89 either has dementia or a medical diagnosis of quot;cognitive impairment without dementia.quot; We study lifecycle patterns in financial...

Uncertainty about length of life, longevity risk, is a growing financial problem for pension funds and annuity providers. They would like to transfer longevity risk away to institutions better placed to deal with it. Unfortunately, there is a lack of financial instruments to hedge against this...

We develop a model of the gambler's fallacy -- the mistaken belief that random sequences should exhibit systematic reversals. We show that an individual who holds this belief and observes a sequence of signals can exaggerate the magnitude of changes in an underlying state but underestimate their...

Behavioral finance has emerged as a new paradigm in financial economics. It deals primarily with the influences of psychology on market finance and with market inefficiencies. The field of psychology, already very present in organizational psychology and decision-making, is slowly opening up...

The notion of awareness is introduced to study Regulation Fair Disclosure, a rule implemented by the U.S. Security and Exchange Commission in 2000. The regulator aims to reduce information asymmetry among investors, and expects public forums to subsume the forbidden information channel of...

This paper puts forward a theory of the lender of last resort policy offered by central banks. We model a two-period OLG economy with standard preferences and a single consumption good. Our economy faces an aggregate endowment risk. The lender of last resort policy can be thought of as a line of...

In the credit card market, banks have to decide on the borrowing limits of their potential customers, when the amounts of borrowing to be incurred on these lines are uncertain. This borrowing uncertainty can make the market incomplete and create ex post misallocations. Households who are denied...

This paper examines the contracting and negotiation process in mergers using an incomplete contracts framework. Our multi-period model allows for the arrival of new information and renegotiation subsequent to the signing of an initial merger agreement but prior to deal completion or termination....