A data intermediary pays consumers for information about their preferences and sells the information so acquired to firms that use it to tailor their products and prices. The social dimension of the individual data - whereby an individual's data are predictive of the behavior of others -...

A data intermediary pays consumers for information about their preferences and sells the information so acquired to firms that use it to tailor their products and prices. The social dimension of the individual data - whereby an individual's data are predictive of the behavior of others -...

Consider two agents who learn the value of an unknown parameter by observing a sequence of private signals. The signals are independent and identically distributed across time but not necessarily across agents. We show that that when each agent's signal space is finite, the agents will commonly...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been justified because they release public funds or save on distortionary taxes. However, the resources saved by a government that does not finance the upfront investment are offset by giving up future revenue flows to the concessionaire. If a PPP can be...

The government contracts with a foreign firm to extract a natural resource that requires an upfront investment and which faces price uncertainty. In states where profits are high, there is a likelihood of expropriation, which generates a social cost that increases with the expropriated value. In...

What are the long-term effects of policies intended to equalize opportunities among different social classes of children? To find out, we study the stationary states of an intergenerational model where adults are either White or Blue collar employees. Both adults and the state invest in their...

This paper revisits the optimal distribution of income model in Fair (1971). This model is the same as in Mirrlees (1971) except that education is also a decision variable and tax rates are restricted to lie on a tax function. In the current paper the tax-rate restriction is relaxed. As in Fair...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are increasingly used to provide infrastructure services. Even though PPPs have the potential to increase efficiency and improve resource allocation, contract renegotiations have been pervasive. We show that existing accounting standards allow governments to...

We analyze games of incomplete information and offer equilibrium predictions which are valid for, and in this sense robust to, all possible private information structures that the agents may have. We completely characterize the set of Bayes correlated equilibria in a class of games with...