We provide rationale, conditions, and insights for "customized" pricing in markets, that is, for equilibria where different buyers pay different prices for similar products. We use a Spence/Riley signaling model enhanced by a signaling methodology under random relations between costs and...

We develop a theory of income and payout smoothing by firms when insiders know more about income than outside shareholders, but property rights ensure that outsiders can enforce a fair payout. Insiders set payout to meet outsiders' expectations and underproduce to manage future expectations...

We present a dynamic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous firms. Owners of the firms delegate investment decisions to managers, whose consumption and investment are private information. We solve the optimal incentive compatible contracts and characterize the implied firm dynamics....

We argue that dividend stickiness, the tendency of managers to keep dividends unchanged, implies that managers use a partially pooling dividend policy. We offer a model that demonstrates how such a policy can evolve endogenously in equilibrium. An informed manager who cares about the firm's...

This paper investigates the effect of corporate risk management on dividend policy. We extend the signaling framework of Bhattacharya (1979) by including the possibility of hedging the future cash flow. We find that the higher the hedging level, the lower the incremental dividend. This result is...

We have examined the value that the market assigns to different components of the cash flow to equity including quot;potentialquot; dividends. We study non financial publicly traded firms of five Latin American countries: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Peru during the period 1991-2007. The...

Payout policy is viewed as a dynamic complement of security design. Security design considerations suggest that firms should optimally use equity to finance assets that are ex ante informationally-sensitive. However, business operations gradually erode the informational sensitivity of a firm's...

Executive Stock Option Programs (SOPs) have become the dominantcompensation instrument for top-management in recent years. Theincentive effects of an SOP both with respect to corporateinvestment and financing decisions critically depend on the design of the SOP. A specific problem in designing...

This study investigates the relative magnitude of the market reactions to dividend and stock repurchase announcements. Prior studies motivate conflicting predictions as to how investors perceive dividend distributions versus stock repurchase announcements as signals about future cash flows....

This paper presents an asymmetric information model of share repurchases when shareholders have heterogenous reservation values. Consistent with empirical evidence, managers in the model repurchase shares at a premium above the post-repurchase share value--transferring wealth from shareholders...