A principal delegates a decision to an agent, who has the capacity to process the relevant information. The principal can jointly control the actions and the information available to the agent. I provide sufficient conditions under which the optimal mechanism (i) attains a perfect alignment of...

This paper revisits recent empirical research on buyer credulity in arts auctions and auctions for assets in general. We show that elementary results in auction theory can fully account for some stylized facts on asset returns that have been held to suggest that sellers of assets can exploit...

Despite the explosive growth of peer-to-peer lending in the People's Republic of China (PRC), information asymmetry remains a critical issue and is likely to be amplified in such an evolving credit market compared to a traditional credit market. This paper studies how investors screen the...

Recent theoretical work suggests that short sellers can manipulate firms into making suboptimal investment decisions. In this study, I empirically test whether short sellers improve or harm the efficiency of firms' capital investment. Overall, I show that short selling improves the efficiency of...

Two activists with correlated private positions in a firm's stock, trade sequentially before simultaneously exerting effort that determines the firm's value. We document the existence of a novel linear equilibrium in which an activist's trades have positive sensitivity to her block size, but...

Using data on all lending deals in the Brazilian stock market from 2009 to 2011, we provide answers to: i) are short-sellers informed in Brazil?, ii) which short sellers are informed?, and iii) how are short sellers informed? The answer to the first question is positive, the Brazilian...