In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

I study the effect of fatigue and innate ability on performance in a model with incomplete contracts, lumpy tasks requiring multiple periods of work and stochastic productivity shocks. I find that increasing ability or reducing fatigue does not lead necessarily to more productive efficiency,...

We present a dynamic contracting model in which the principal and the agent disagree about the resolution of uncertainty, and we illustrate the contract design in an application with Bayesian learning. The disagreement creates gains from trade that the principal realizes by transferring payment...

We present a dynamic contracting model in which the principal and agent disagree about the resolution of uncertainty, and we illustrate the contract design in an application with Bayesian learning. The disagreement creates gains from trade that the principal realizes by transferring payment to...

This paper explores the socially optimal level of insurance given that individuals are subject to behavioral biases, in particular narrow framing and loss aversion. The central issue of this normative analysis is whether or not a social welfare function (SWF) should take into consideration the...

Why would social science need the help from quantum mechanics? First, there are many unanswerable questions in social science. Are financial markets predictable? How to predict the financial markets? These important questions are not answerable in the existing framework of finance or economics....

I measure information on distinct facets of quality from a corpus of reviews and characterize how decision-makers integrate this information present in text with that available through other channels. Specifically, I demonstrate that referee comments at a scholarly journal contain information on...

This article analyzes the effect of speculation on the economic welfare from various criteria, using a simple Edgeworth box within a three-period Walrasian competition framework. Here ldquo;speculationrdquo; is defined as a series of transition processes of each agent's spontaneous production of...

To the uninitiated, transaction costs are often mysterious at best and dubious at worst. Even among economists who use the term often, there are misunderstandings as to what transaction costs actually are. I argue that much of the transaction cost "image" is caused by the lack of a workable...

This chapter addresses the history, use and significance of the term transaction costs. Few words in the economic language have been more abused or fought over and this is shown to result from the emergence of two distinct definitions and uses. The ‘Neoclassical’ definition rests on the...