Players choose a stochastic choice rule, assigning a probability of “investing” as a function of a state. Players receive a return to investment that is increasing in the proportion of others who invest and the state. In addition, they incur a small cost associated with adapting the...

We study the optimality of debt through the interaction between security design and information acquisition. An impatient seller designs a security backed by her asset in place and a buyer decides whether to buy the security in order to provide liquidity. Facing different securities, the buyer...

Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring technology that governs the above procedure is part of the...

We propose a theory of security design in financing entrepreneurial production, positing that the investor can acquire costly information on the entrepreneur's project before making the financing decision. When the entrepreneur has enough bargaining power in security design, the optimal security...

We study flexible information acquisition in a coordination game. "Flexible" acquisition means that players choose not only how much but also what kind of information to acquire. Information acquisition has a cost proportional to reduction of entropy. Hence, players will collect the information...

In many practical problems, both decision and estimation are involved. This dissertation intends to study the relationship between decision and estimation in these problems, so that more accurate inference methods can be developed. Hybrid estimation is an important formulation that deals with...

Recent technology advances have enabled firms to flexibly process and analyze sophisticated employee performance data at a reduced and yet significant cost. We develop a theory of optimal incentive contracting where the monitoring technology that governs the above procedure is part of the...

An issuer designs a contract and agents flexibly acquire information when deciding whether to accept it and provide liquidity. Unlike the existing literature, we do not impose any physical restriction on information structure to capture the idea of flexible information acquisition. Facing an...