This paper studies the impact of financing constraints in patent races. We develop a model of optimal contracting where firms finance their R&D expenditures with an investor who cannot verify their effort. In equilibrium, firms are more likely to win the more cash and assets they hold prior to...

This paper uses the NBER Patents and Citations Data merged with COMPUSTAT to identify and measure the dependency of innovation success on cash holdings in a patent race environment where firms race to innovate first and their innovation efforts are correlated. A firm's cash holdings increase its...

I study a principal-agent model in which the agent collects information and then chooses a verifiable action. I show that the principal can find it desirable to constrain the agent's action set even though there is no disagreement about the ranking of actions ex post. The elimination or...

We study strategic information transmission in a Sender-Receiver game where players' optimal actions depend on the realization of multiple signals but the players disagree on the relative importance of each piece of news. We characterize a statistical environment - featuring symmetric loss...

We study the regulation of a firm with unknown demand and cost information. In contrast to previous studies, we assume demand is influenced by a quality choice, and the firm has private information about its quality capacity in addition to its cost. Under natural conditions, asymmetric...

We analyze a two-stage patent race. In the first phase firms seek to develop a research tool, an innovation that has no commercial value but is necessary to enter the second phase of the race. The firm that completes the second phase of the race first obtains a patent on the final innnovation...

This paper studies the impact of financing constraints on the equilibrium of a patent race. We develop a model where firms finance their R&D expenditures with an investor who cannot verify their effort. We solve for the optimal financial contract of any firm along its best-response function. In...

I reconsider Stiglitz's (1977) problem of monopolistic insurance with a continuum of types. Using a suitable transformation of control variables I obtain an analytical characterization of the optimal insurance policies. Closed form solutions and comparative statics results for special cases are...