Despite major recent advance in the literature on financial crises, the key role of central banks in financial crises is still not well understood. Our aim is to contribute to a better understanding of the dynamics of financial crises by explicitly modeling the strategic options of both traders...

I show how irrational ideas and rumors can drive asset prices - not because anyone believes them, but because they are commonly known without being common knowledge. The phenomenon is driven by short-term market participants who are well-informed about the information that others have, and who...

The psychology literature provides ample evidence that people have difficulties taking the perspective of less informed others. This paper presents a controlled experiment showing that this "curse of knowledge" can cause comparative overconfidence and overentry into competition. In a broader...

We consider the contracting problem of a principal who faces an agent with private information and cannot commit to not renegotiate a chosen contract. To analyze this problem, we propose an infinite horizon negotiation protocol in which renegotiation is frictionless, executed without delay and...

Governments must usually take policy decisions with an imperfect knowledge of the economic actors' type or the actors' effort level. These issues are addressed within the framework of classic adverse selection or moral hazard models. I discuss in this paper how would the government's and the...

We study the role of information about the multiplier in a finitely repeated investment game. A high multiplier increases the reputational incentives of a trustee, leading to more repayments. Our perfect Bayesian equilibrium analysis shows that if the trustee is privately informed about the...

We study the economic consequences of opportunities for dishonesty in an environment where efficiency relevant behaviour is not contractible, but rather incentivized by informal agreements in an ongoing relationship. We document the repeated interaction between a principal and an agent who,...

Can fiscal policy raise utility for all in dynamic economies with unobservable agent heterogeneity, when missing credit and insurance markets affect incentives to invest in human capital? If so, should the state provide transfers to the poor in the form of cash or in kind? In an occupational...

Motivated by trying to better understand the norms that govern pedestrian traffic, I study symmetric two-player coordination games with independent private values. The strategies of "always pass on the left" and "always pass on the right" are always equilibria of this game. Some such games,...