This paper investigates the intraday effects of unannounced foreign exchange intervention on bid-ask exchange rate spreads using official intraday intervention data provided by the Danish central bank. Our starting point is a simple theoretical model of the bid-ask spread which we use to...

We characterize when private equity funds have a competitive advantage over strategic buyers in acquiring a target firm. Private equity funds are more inclined to cut loss-making projects, thereby gaining an information advantage for understanding value creation with the target's remaining...

This paper explores rational social learning in which everyone only sees unordered random samples from the action history. In this model, herds need not occur when the distant past can be sampled. If private signal strengths are unbounded and the past is not over-sampled -- not forever affected...

This paper systematically analyzes and enriches the observational learning paradigm of Banerjee (1992) and Bikhchandani, Hirshleifer, and Welch (1992). Our contributions fall into three categories. First, we develop what we consider to be the right analytic framework for informational herding...

We present some simple utility functions whose Marshallian demand functions possess the Giffen property: at some price-wealth pairs, the demand for a good marginally increases in response to an increase in its own price. The utility functions satisfy standard preference properties throughout the...

Private equity funds and strategic buyers search for targets, in particular those with valuable growth options and in financial distress. We analyze the role of private equity funds jointly with the effect of debt overhang and the effect of cross-subsidization with a strategic buyer's firm. A...

We show that far from capturing a formally new phenomenon, informational herding is really a special case of single-person experimentation ­ and 'bad herds' the typical failure of complete learning. We then analyze the analogous team equilibrium, where individuals maximize the present...