Weak contract enforcement may reduce the efficiency of production in developing countries. I study how contract enforcement affects efficiency in procurement auctions for the largest power projects in India. I gather data on bidding and ex post contract renegotiation and find that the...

We propose a class of multiple-prior representations of preferences under ambiguity where the belief the decision-maker (DM) uses to evaluate an uncertain prospect is the outcome of a game played by two conflicting forces, Pessimism and Optimism. The model does not restrict the sign of the DM's...

We derive bounds on the scope for a confidence band to adapt to the unknown regularity of a non-parametric function that is observed with noise, such as a regression function or density, under the self-similarity condition proposed by Gine and Nickl (2010). We find that adaptation can only be...

We study the classic sequential screening problem in the presence of ex-post participation constraints. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions that determine exhaustively when the optimal selling mechanism is either static or sequential. In the static contract, the buyers are not...

Do new migration opportunities for rural households change the nature and extent of informal risk sharing? We experimentally document that randomly offering poor rural households subsidies to migrate leads to a 40% improvement in risk sharing in their villages. We explain this finding using a...

Standard tests and confidence sets in the moment inequality literature are not robust to model misspecification in the sense that they exhibit spurious precision when the identified set is empty. This paper introduces tests and confidence sets that provide correct asymptotic inference for a...

In a "common values" environment, some market participants have private information relevant to others' assessments of their own valuations or costs. Economic theory shows that this type of informational asymmetry can have important implications for market performance and market design. Yet even...

Improving school quality with limited resources is a key issue of policy. It has been suggested that instructing teachers to follow specific practices together with tight monitoring of their activities may help improve outcomes in under-performing schools that usually serve poor populations....

Information dissemination and aggregation are key economic functions of financial markets. How intelligent do traders have to be for the complex task of aggregating diverse information (i.e., approximate the predictions of the rational expectations equilibrium) in a competitive double auction...

We propose a multiple-prior model of preferences under ambiguity that provides a unified lens through which to understand different formalizations of ambiguity aversion, as well as context-dependent negative and positive ambiguity attitudes documented in experiments. This model, Boolean...