Innovative start-ups and venture capitalists are highly clustered: Silicon Valley is probably the best-known example. Clusters differ in the contracts they use, and in how they perform. I explore the link between spillovers, contractual design and performance. I find that more "incomplete"...

The renegotiation of regulatory contracts is known to prevent regulators from achieving the full commitment efficient outcome in dynamic contexts. However, assessing the cost of such renegotiation remains an open issue from an empirical viewpoint. To address this question, we fit a structural...

We consider a price discrimination problem in which a seller has a single object for sale to a potential buyer. At the time of contracting, the buyer's private type is his incomplete private information about his value, and the seller can disclose additional private information to the buyer. We...

We study mechanism design in a setting where agents know their types but are uncertain about the utility from any alternative. The final realized utility of each agent is observed by the principal and can be contracted upon. In such environments, the principal is not restricted to using only...

We study the mechanism-design problem of guaranteeing desirable performances whenever agents are rational in the sense of not playing weakly dominated strategies. We first provide an upper bound for the best performance we can guarantee among all feasible mechanisms. We then prove the bound to...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

This paper explores a new role for venture capitalists, as knowledge intermediaries. A venture capital investor can communicate valuable knowledge to an entrepreneur, facilitating innovation. The venture capitalist can also communicate the entrepreneur's innovative knowledge to other portfolio...

We study mechanism design in a setting where agents know their types but are uncertain about the utility from any alternative. The final realized utility of each agent is observed by the principal and can be contracted upon. In such environments, the principal is not restricted to using only...

This paper studies markets plagued with asymmetric information on the quality of traded goods. In Akerlof's setting, sellers are better informed than buyers. In contrast, we examine cases where buyers are better informed than sellers. This creates an inverse adverse selection problem: The market...