A principal contracts optimally with an agent to operate a firm over an infinite time horizon when the agent is liquidity constrained and has access to private information about the sequence of cost realizations. We formulate this mechanism design problem as a recursive dynamic program in which...

When a firm can recognize its previous customers, it may use information about their past purchases in order to price discriminate. We study a model with a monopolist and a continuum of heterogeneous consumers, where consumers have the ability to maintain their anonymity and avoid being...

How do price commitments impact the amount of information firms acquire about potential customers? We examine this question in the context of a competitive market. Contracts are incomplete because the amount of information firms acquire about applicants during the screening process cannot be...

Motivated by the unprecedented availability of consumer information on the Internet, we characterize the winners and losers from potential privacy regulation in the context of four commonly-used oligopoly models: a linear city model, a circular city model, a vertical differentiation model, and a...

This article summarizes and draws connections among diverse streams of theoretical and empirical research on the economics of privacy. We focus on the economic value and consequences of protecting and disclosing personal information, and on consumers' understanding and decisions regarding the...

A well-known shortcoming of rational voter models is that the equilibrium probability that an individual votes converges to zero as the population of citizens tends to infinity. We show that this does not - as is often suggested - imply that equilibrium voter turnout is insignificant in the...

We present a theory of strategic voting that predicts elections are more likely to be close and voter turnout is more likely to be high when citizens possess better public information about the composition of the electorate. These findings are disturbing because they suggest that providing more...

We study the optimal incentive scheme for a multistage project in which the agent privately observes intermediate progress. The optimal contract involves a "soft deadline" wherein the principal guarantees funding up to a certain date -- if the agent reports progress at that date, then the...

An entrepreneur contracts with a consultant, who is protected by limited liability, to supply information about the state of a project prior to investing in it. For a given level of investment, a good project succeeds with higher probability than a bad one. The entrepreneur makes an upfront...