We identify a new channel – market makers' attention constraints – through which earnings announcements for one stock affect the liquidity of other stocks. When some stocks handled by a designated market maker have earnings announcements, liquidity is lower for non-announcement stocks...

This paper develops a theoretical framework for studying contract and enforcement in settings of complete, but unverifiable, information. The main point of the paper is that the consideration of renegotiation necessitates formal examination of other technological constraints, especially those...

We show how hard evidence can be incorporated into the mechanism-design framework. We provide a link between real evidence and abstract declarations, which clarifies when the abstract-declaration environment, which was first studied in Green and Laffont's (1986) "limited verifiability" analysis,...

This paper shows that, contrary to what is generally believed, decreasing concavity of the agent's utility function with respect to the screening variable is not sufficient to ensure that stochastic mechanisms are suboptimal. The paper demonstrates, however, that they are suboptimal whenever the...