We characterize Contractual Saving for Housing (CSH), a widespread and important product of household housing finance in Continental Europe, as relationship lending that is based on information production about borrowers in preceding saving relationships. In a multi-period partial equilibrium...

Observational learning theories often assume that people's actions can be observed. However, in many naturally-occurring environments, individuals can choose whether to disclose their behavior to others. We provide theoretical analysis of observational learning under optional disclosure...

Borrowing decisions affect most households, with large stakes and implications for subfields as varied as macroeconomics and industrial organization. I review theoretical and empirical work on household debt: its prevalence, level, growth, and composition, as well as various measures of consumer...

We explore theoretically and experimentally whether information design can be used by trustees as a signaling device to boost trusting acts in once-off interactions. In our main setting, a trustee partially or fully decides a binary payoff allocation and designs an information structure, then a...

Many important decisions within public and private organizations are based on recommendations from expert committees and advisory boards. A notable example is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's advisory committees, which make recommendations on new drug applications. Previously the voting...

In institutional frameworks comprising of n2 agents, there are often aspects of the institution or specific exchanges or entities within the institution that require to be changed. Carrying out such a change involves a game of co-ordination between the agents who wish to make it and they can...

This paper examines the relationship between competition and efficiency in a market in which incentive contracts are offered to overconfident agents. The context is a labor market in which worker effort is not observed by firms (moral hazard), workers have private information about their...

This paper shows that the principal can strictly benefit from delegating a decision to an agent whose opinion differs from that of the principal. We consider a ``delegated expertise'' problem in which the agent has an advantage in information acquisition relative to the principal, as opposed to...