In this essay I discuss how theoretical models in finance and economics are used in ways that make them "chameleons" and how chameleons devalue the intellectual currency and muddy policy debates. A model becomes a chameleon when it is built on assumptions with dubious connections to the real...

A new class of online services allows publishers to direct readers from articles they are currently reading to other web-based content they may be interested in. A key feature of such a dynamic recommendation service is that users interact with the provider along their browsing path. While the...

Currently available medication for treating many chronic diseases is often effective only for a subgroup of patients, and biomarkers accurately assessing whether an individual belongs to this subgroup do not exist. In such settings, physicians learn about the effectiveness of a drug primarily...

This paper develops a theory of how organizations make timing decisions. We consider a problem in which an uninformed principal decides when to exercise an option and needs to rely on the information of an informed but biased agent. This problem is common in firms: examples include headquarters...

The authors investigate how both the amount and source of income affects the importance placed on money using a longitudinal analysis of the British Household Panel Survey and evidence from two laboratory experiments. Larger amounts of money received for labor were associated with individuals...

We study a dynamic strategic model of voluntary disclosure of multiple pieces of information. Such situations are prevalent in real life, e.g., in corporate disclosure environments that are characterized by information asymmetry between the firm and the capital market with respect to whether,...

I present a theory of optimal multilateral trade agreements with public political shocks. I first show that "forbearance"-- where one country withholds retaliation when its trading partner receives a shock-- is a feature of an optimal agreement. This provides a rationale for countries not acting...

Price controls lead to misallocation of goods and encourage rent-seeking. The misallocation effect alone is enough to ensure that consumer surplus is always reduced by a price control in an otherwise-competitive market with convex demand if supply is more elastic than demand; or when demand is...

When do voters win? Democracies have appealing properties, but failures of democracies to produce policies that benefit the voter abound. What conditions determine the success of the unorganized voter who only possess a blunt tool-- the vote-- versus an organized special interest group or firm?...

To ensure that individual actors take certain actions, community enforcement may be required. This can present a rules-versus-discretion dilemma: It can become impossible to employ discretion based on information that is not widely held, because the wider community is unable to tell whether the...