Players often engage in high-profile public communications to demonstrate their confidence of winning before they carry out actual competitive activities. This paper investigates players' incentives to conduct such pre-contest communication. We assume that a player suffers a cost when he sends a...

An incumbent employee competes against a new hire for bonus or promotion. The incumbent's ability is commonly known, while that of the new hire is private information.The incumbent is subject to a perceptional bias: His prior about the new hire's type differs from the true underlying...

Much of the literature on pricing commercial mortgages and commercial mortgage-backed securities has assumed homogeneity in prepayment penalty structure. This study provides evidence that such an assumption is inappropriate and examines the effect of penalty structures observed in actual...

This paper develops a novel technique that allows us to characterize the optimal biased generalized lottery contest. In our baseline setting, we search for the optimal multiplicative biases for asymmetric Tullock contests — i.e., the weights placed on contestants' effort entries in the contest...

We analyze multi-market interactions between firms which must invest limited budgets in value (surplus) creation as well as in competitive rent-seeking activities. Firms are horizontally differentiated on a line segment and compete for multiple markets/prizes which differ in the relative...

Previous research into law and corporate social responsibility mostly assumes that the vertical structure of production is exogenous. By outsourcing, a brand may avoid some liability and responsibility, but lose direct control over the evasive actions that cause harm. Here, we analyze the trade...

We examine how disclosure policy can be optimally designed to incentivize contestants when their participation is exogenously stochastic. In a generalized Tullock contest setting with two players who are asymmetric in both their values and entry probabilities, we fully characterize the necessary...

In mortgage default modeling, many of the key variables, such as loan age, FICO score, Debt-to-Income Ratio (DTI), and Loan-to-House-Value Ratio (LTV), have nonlinear relationship with the target default/delinquency rates. To catch the nonlinearity in the response function, experienced modelers...