State sponsored retirement plans have been proposed and implemented to provide people with new access to defined contribution retirement opportunities. Many of these people have no other options and typically have low income and are less educated. We study optimal plan implementation in a...

Bargaining with bilateral asymmetric information is generally not efficient. In this paper, I develop a theoretical model to show that firms can recapture trade efficiency and avoid this surplus loss by adding an intermediary to the trading mechanism. This increase in total surplus motivates...

How does trust evolve in markets? What is the optimal level of government regulation and how does this intervention affect trust and economic growth? How do professional fees affect trust formation? In a two-stage theoretical model, we analyze the trust that evolves in markets, given the value...

Is competition sufficient to induce transparency in financial markets? We examine this question taking into consideration that competition in financial markets frequently resembles a tournament, where superior relative performance and greater visibility are rewarded with convex payoffs. We show...