A controversy has been simmering in law for at least 30 years about whether pro bono work should be mandatory for lawyers, who now donate 1-3% of their time to the poor. This has centered on the unmet legal needs of the poor, the duty of lawyers, and the contrast with US doctors, who are...

Primary care physicians have two roles: the healer and the gatekeeper. We show that, due to information asymmetries, they cannot be expected to fulfill the latter role. Better gatekeepers will be poorer healers; hence all patients, both truly sick and shirkers, will strictly prefer physicians...

Although physicians are often expected to be gatekeepers to health insurance benefits such as paid sick leave, research indicates a substantial reluctance to reject patient requests for sickness certificates. We show that private information on the patient's part creates a conflict between the...

The 1990s have witnessed a revival in economists' interest and hope of explaining aggregate and microeconomic investment behavior. New theories, better econometric procedures, and more detailed panel data sets are behind this movement. Much of the progress has occurred at the level of...

In recent years financing through the creation of an independent project company or financing by non-recourse debt has become an important part of corporate decisions. Shah and Thakor (JET, 1987) argue that project financing can be optimal when asymmetric information exists between firm's...

In economic environments, decision-makers can strategically delay irreversible investments to learn from the actions of others. This creates free-riding incentives and can lead to socially suboptimal outcomes. We experimentally examine if and how communication mitigates this free-riding problem...

This paper discusses the strategic role of mismatching, where players voluntarily form inefficient teams or forego the formation of efficient teams, respectively. Strategic mismatching can be rational when players realize a competitive advantage (e.g. harming other competitors). In addition, the...

We derive the optimal selling mechanism for a monopolist who is privately informed about the attributes of a horizontally differentiated good. To do so, we set up an informed principal problem in a Hotelling model where the buyer's preferences are described in terms of a base consumption value...

This paper studies information acquisition and use in network games. The network structure incorporates both strategic complements (positive links) and substitutes (negative links). An information-use game played on a correlation-adjusted network is derived. Equilibrium inefficiencies in both...

We investigate optimal rationing of resources and organizational slack when a principal procures from an agent with private information about fixed and variable costs. We study the problem in a two‐period setting with persistent types and investigate how the optimal rationing and slack depend...