It is often suggested that incentive schemes under moral hazard can be gamed by an agent with superior knowledge of the environment, and that deliberate lack of transparency about the incentive scheme can reduce gaming. We formally investigate these arguments. Ambiguous incentive schemes induce...

We study two sources of delay in teams: freeriding and lack of communication. Partners contribute to the value of a common project, but have private information about the success of their own efforts. When the deadline is far away, unsuccessful partners freeride on each others' efforts. When the...

A central goal of any economy is to achieve rapid and sustained growth. This cannot happen without continued innovation. This landmark Handbook brings together many of the world’s legal scholars to examine features of the legal infrastructure that affect both innovation and growth....

Consumer search is not only costly but also tiring. We characterize the intertemporal effects that search fatigue has on oligopoly prices, product proliferation, and the provision of consumer assistance (i.e., advice). These effects vary based on whether search is all-or-nothing or sequential in...

We analyze costly information acquisition and information revelation in groups in a dynamic setting. Even when group members have perfectly aligned interests the group may inefficiently delay decisions. When deadlines are far away, uninformed group members freeride on each others' efforts to...

Using a high-stakes field experiment conducted with a financial brokerage, we implement a novel design to separately identify two channels of social influence in financial decisions, both widely studied theoretically. When someone purchases an asset, his peers may also want to purchase it, both...