We introduce and solve a new class of "downward-recursive" static portfolio choice problems. An individual simultaneously chooses among ranked stochastic options, and each choice is costly. In the motivational application, just one may be exercised from those that succeed. This often emerges in...

In many democratic countries, the timing of elections is flexible. We explore this potentially valuable option using insights from option pricing in finance. The paper offers three main contributions on this problem. First, we derive a rationally-based mean-reverting political support process...

This paper produces a comprehensive theory of the value of Bayesian information and its static demand. Our key insight is to assume 'natural units' corresponding to the sample size of conditionally i.i.d. signals -- focusing on the smooth nearby model of the precision of an observation of a...

We show that far from capturing a formally new phenomenon, informational herding is really a special case of single-person experimentation -- and 'bad herds' the typical failure of complete learning. We then analyze the analogous team equilibrium, where individuals maximize the present...

This paper revisits Wald's (1947) sequential experimentation paradigm, now assuming that an impatient decision maker can run variable-size experiments each period at some increasing and strictly convex cost before finally choosing an irreversible action. We translate this natural discrete time...

There are two varieties of timing games in economics: In a war of attrition, more predecessors helps; in a pre-emption game, more predecessors hurts. In this paper, we introduce and explore a spanning class with rank-order payoffs that subsumes both as special cases. In this environment with...

Consider Becker's classic 1963 matching model, with unobserved fixed types and stochastic publicly observed output. If types are complementary, then matching is assortative in the known Bayesian posteriors (the 'reputations'). We discover a robust failure of Becker's result in the simplest...

We consider an single object auction environment with interdependent valuations and a generalized Vickrey-Clark-Groves allocation mechanism that allocates the object almost efficiently in a strict ex post equilibrium. If there is a significant amount of interdependence, there are multiple...

Some limit properties for information based model selection criteria are given in the context of unit root evaluation and various assumptions about initial conditions. Allowing for a nonparametric short memory component, standard information criteria are shown to be weakly consistent for a unit...

The aggregation problem in demand analysis and exchange equilibrium is studied by putting restrictions on the shape of the distribution of the agents' characteristics. This is done by exploiting the finite dimensional linear structure induced on demand functions by affine transformations of the...