Markets are often viewed as a tool for aggregating disparate private knowledge, a stance supported by past laboratory experiments. However, traders' acquisition cost of information has typically been ignored. Results from a laboratory experiment involving six treatments varying the cost of...

This paper aims to study the impact of costly and private information acquisition in global games with applications in financial crisis (e.g. bank runs, currency crisis). While exogenous asymmetric information has been shown to select a unique equilibrium, we show that the endogenous costly...

Both empirical and theoretical studies suggest that currency attacks can occur even in a fixed exchange rate regime with sound fundamentals. Can mechanisms be designed to prevent such currency attacks? To address this question, we first need a theory of currency crisis. I argue that such a...

In this paper we challenge basic results of signaling models. In our banking model each project of a borrower is described by a continuous density of outcomes. Different density functions are classified according to second stochastisch dominance. Combining these features we find that in a...

We study firms' incentives to acquire private information in a setting where subsequent competition leads to firms' later signaling their private information to rivals. Due to signaling, equilibrium prices are distorted, and so while firms benefit from obtaining more precise private information,...

Under asymmetric information, dishonest sellers lead to market unraveling in the lemons model. An additional cost of dishonesty is that language becomes cheap talk. We develop instead a model where people derive utility from actions (what they say), as well as from outcomes, so talk is costly....

We show that on-demand insurance contracts, an innovative form of coverage recently introduced through the InsurTech sector, can serve as a screening device. To this end, we develop a new adverse selection model consistent with Wilson (1977), Miyazaki (1977) and Spence (1978). Consumers have...

We analyze a canonical binary-action coordination game under the global games framework. To reduce coordination failure, we propose a novel intervention program that screens agents based on their heterogeneous interim beliefs. Compared with conventional government-guarantee type of programs, it...

This paper introduces two simple betting mechanisms, Top-Flop and Threshold betting, to elicit unverifiable information from crowds. Agents are offered bets on the rating of an item about which they received a private signal versus that of a random item. We characterize conditions for the chosen...

Regulators and the firms they regulate interact repeatedly. Over the course of these interactions, the regulator collects data that contains information about the firm's id- iosyncratic private characteristics. This paper studies the case in which the regulator uses information gleaned from past...