Cost allocations have befuddled managers around the world for over a century. The need for objective, actionable cost accounting data is frustrated not just by the difficult theoretical issues in distinguishing among various classes of cost, but also by informational asymmetries and agency...

This paper contributes to the economics of financial institutions risk management by exploring how loan securitization affects their default risk, their systematic risk, and their stock prices. In a typical CDO transaction a bank retains through a first loss piece a very high proportion of the...

We formulate a pretrial negotiation problem as an infinite horizon bargaining model with one-sided uncertainty and alternating offers, with the informed party having an outside option. The plaintiff has private information and also has an outside option of quot;going to court.quot; The defendant...

We consider social contracts for resolving conflicts between two agents who are uncertain about each other's fighting potential. Applications include international conflict, litigation, and elections. Even though only a peaceful agreement avoids a loss of resources, if this loss is small enough,...

This paper makes an attempt to present the economics of credit securitization in a non-technical way, starting from the description and the analysis of a typical securitization transaction. The paper sketches a theoretical explanation for why tranching, or nonproportional risk sharing, which is...

This paper identifies eight reasons why it is rational not to trust large complex Anglo corporations and how these reasons could be removed. Two reasons are that directors are overloaded with information but also lack information independent of management to evaluate management and the business....

This paper explains why so called quot;world best practicesquot; in corporate governance developed in the US and the UK represent the problem not the solution for the crisis in capitalism that has reduced share values by trillions of dollars. One reason is that a unitary board has absolute power...

Two players with independent private values compete for a prize in an all-pay contest. Before the contest, each player can spy on the opponent by privately acquiring a costly, noisy, and private signal about his private value. In a symmetric equilibrium of the contest where players spy on each...

In this paper, we propose and analyze a distributed negotiation strategy for a multi-agent multi-attribute negotiation in which the agents have no information about the utility functions of other agents. We analytically prove that, if the zone of agreement is non-empty and the agents concede up...

Consider a society where ethnic conflict is imminent due to people's belief about the state of the world. An `informed agent' is a player who has private information about the state. We analyze whether the informed agent can achieve peace by sending private messages to the players. If the...