We study mechanisms for selecting up to m out of n projects. Project managers’ private information on quality is elicited through transfers. Under limited liability, the optimal mechanism selects projects that maximize some function of the project’s observable and reported characteristics....

Firms learn imperfectly about their cost of investment. We study how this information affects firms’ incentives to invest in R&D by comparing investments and profits under public and private information. Revenue sharing between the winner and loser of the race, e.g. through licensing...

Firms learn imperfectly about their cost of investment. We study how this information affects firms' incentives to invest in R&D by comparing investments and profits under public and private information. Revenue sharing between the winner and loser of the race, e.g. through licensing contracts,...

I study a model of centralized school choice in which students engage in costly search over schools before submitting preference reports to a clearinghouse. I consider three classes of preferences over schools---idiosyncratic, common, and hybrid---and characterize outcomes under two search...

This paper analyses an entry timing game with uncertain entry costs. Two firms receive costless signals about the cost of a new project and decide when to invest. We characterize the equilibrium of the investment timing game with private and public signals. We show that competition leads the two...

Incumbent firms, especially in high-tech industries, often contract and collaborate with small research units on single projects. A delicate resulting contracting decision thus is how to allocate control. This paper considers the incumbent's problem to design a research contract that specifies:...

The imperfect appropriability of revenues from innovation affects the incentives of firms to invest, and to disclose information about their innovative productivity. It creates a free-rider effect in the competition for the innovation that countervails the familiar business-stealing effect....

We analyze the incentives to disclose intermediate research results. We find that despite the help that disclosure can give to a rival, the leading innovator sometimes chooses to disclose. Disclosure signals commitment to the research project, which may induce a rival to exit. With weak product...

We study the effects of credit rationing on Research and Development (R&D) investment using survey and accounting data on a large representative sample of manufacturing small and medium size enterprises (SMEs). Our econometric model accounts for the endogeneity of our credit rationing indicator...

We study the agency problem between a firm and its research employees. In a multi-agent contracting setting, we show explicitly the way in which the optimal incentive regime is a function of how agents' efforts interact with one another: relative-performance evaluation is used when their efforts...