Freelancers face cold-start problems in online labor markets: getting hired is very difficult without ratings, while obtaining a rating is impossible unless already having been hired. According to economic theory and empirical evidence, advertising can serve as a signal of product quality for...

We use the tools of mechanism design, combined with the theory of risk measures, to analyze how a cash constrained owner of an asset with known stochastic returns raises capital from a population of investors that differ in their risk aversion and budget constraints. The issuer partitions the...

We study an information design problem with continuous state and discrete signal space. Under convex value functions, the optimal information structure is interval-partitional and exhibits a dual expectations property: each induced signal is the conditional mean (taken under the prior density)...

Financiers in early-stage entrepreneurial finance are known for their "spray-and-pray" approach, where they fund multiple start-ups expecting profits on a few to compensate losses on a lot of failed ones. We develop a theoretical framework in which financiers compete to fund entrepreneurs in an...

This paper develops a mechanism design approach to study externalities and re-distribution. The mechanism screens individuals’ social weights to strike a balance among broad distributional objectives, incentives to work, and incentives to reduce externalities. The welfare-optimal allocation...

The decentralized nature of blockchain markets has given rise to a complex and highly heterogeneous market structure, gaining increasing importance as traditional and decentralized (DeFi) finance become more interconnected. This paper introduces the DeFi intermediation chain and provides...

The decentralized nature of blockchain markets has given rise to a complex and highly heterogeneous market structure, gaining increasing importance as traditional and decentralized (DeFi) finance become more interconnected. This paper introduces the DeFi intermediation chain and provides...