In the hold-up problem incomplete contracts cause the proceeds of relation-specific investments to be allocated by ex-post bargaining. The present paper investigates the efficiency of incomplete contracts if individuals have heterogeneous preferences implying heterogeneous bargaining behavior...

We introduce intention-based social preferences into mechanism design. We explore information structures that dier with respect to what is commonly known about the weight that agents attach to reciprocal kindness. When the designer has no information on reciprocity types, implementability of an...

According to several psychological and economic studies, non-binding communication can be an effective tool to increase trust and enhance cooperation. This paper focuses on reasons why people stick to a given promise and analyzes to what extent image concerns of being perceived as a promise...

We reconsider the canonical model of price setting with menu costs by Ball and Romer (1990). Their original model exhibits multiple equilibria for nominal aggregate demand shocks of intermediate size. By abandoning Ball and Romer's (1990) assumption that demand shocks are common knowledge among...

Empirical research suggests that - rather than improving incentives - exerting control can reduce workers' performance by eroding motivation. The present paper shows that intention-based reciprocity can cause such motivational crowding-out if individuals differ in their propensity for...

Markets for expert services are characterized by information asymmetries between experts and consumers. We analyze the effects of consumer information, where consumers suffer from either a minor or serious problem and only experts can infer the appropriate treatment. Consumer information is a...

In the hold-up problem incomplete contracts cause the proceeds of relation specific investments to be allocated by ex-post bargaining. The present paper investigates the efficiency of incomplete contracts if individuals have heterogeneous preferences implying heterogeneous bargaining behavior...

Heifetz, Meier and Schipper (2005) introduced a generalized state-space model that allows for non-trivial unawareness among several individuals and strong properties of knowledge. We show that this generalized state-space model arises naturally if states consist of maximally consistent sets of...

Lynn Stout's paper on Risk, Speculation, and OTC Derivatives: An Inaugural Essay for Convivium develops an insightful legal-economic analysis of speculative trading. From one hand, the paper discusses the legal-economic framework of speculation and its recent transformation, making reference to...

We develop awareness-dependent subjective expected utility by taking unawareness structures introduced in Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper (2006, 2008, 2011a) as primitives in the Anscombe-Aumann approach to subjective expected utility. We observe that a decision maker is unaware of an event if and...