This paper is a review of fintech and its interaction with banking. Included in fintech are innovations in payment systems (including cryptocurrencies), credit markets (including P2P lending), and insurance, with blockchain-assisted smart contract playing a role. The paper provides a definition...

This paper is a review of the literature on fintech and its interaction with banking. Included in fintech are innovations in payment systems (including cryptocurrencies), credit markets (including P2P lending), and insurance, with blockchain-assisted smart contracts playing a role. The paper...

This paper examines the determinants of organizational scale and scope, with applications to various industries, including financial services. We build a model in which new opportunities arise for firms, but the skills needed to exploit them effectively are unknown. Early investments in these...

In this paper we introduce flexibility as an economic concept and apply it to the firm’ssecurity issuance decision and capital structure choice. Flexibility is the ability to makedecisions that one thinks are best even when others disagree. The firm’s management valuesflexibility because it...

We develop an economic theory of “flexibility”, which we interpret as the discretion orability to make a decision that others disagree with. We show that flexibility is essentiallyan option for the decisionmaker, and can be valued as such. The value of the flexibilityoption is decreasing in...

In organizations, ideas are often delegated for evaluation as a means of efficiently aggregating multiple information signals. However, those who delegate often find it impossible to separate the evaluation of the ideas they delegate from the evaluation of abilities of those delegated the task...