When a group of investors with dispersed private information jointly invest in a risky project, how should they divide the project payoff? A typical common stock contract rewards investors in proportion to their initial investment, but does it make the best use of investors' crowd wisdom? By...

We exploit a quasi-natural experiment to identify the importance of professional connections in determining a firm's board composition. At the individual level, directors who share work experiences with the executives/directors of bankrupt firms experience on average a 6-percentage-point decline...

Much has been studied about the role of the market in information aggregation. This paper argues that a well-designed contract in general, and some simple affine contract under standard conditions in specific, could play a similar role. Our results revisit a simple question: When a group of...

In recent years, the designs of many new blockchain applications have been inspired by the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) problem. While traditional BFT protocols assume that most system nodes are honest (in that they follow the protocol), we recognize that blockchains are deployed in...

In recent years, the designs of many new blockchain applications have been inspired by the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) problem. While traditional BFT protocols assume that most system nodes are honest (in that they follow the protocol), we recognize that blockchains are deployed in...

In recent years, the designs of many new blockchain applications have been inspired by the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) problem. While traditional BFT protocols assume that most system nodes are honest (in that they follow the protocol), we recognize that blockchains are deployed in...

The rise of centralized mining pools for risk sharing does not necessarily undermine the decentralization required for permissionless blockchains: Each individual miner's cross-pool diversification and endogenous fees charged by pools generally sustain decentralization, because larger pools...