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...

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 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...

We investigate the outcomes of simultaneous price competition in the presence of private information on the demand side. Each of two sellers offers a different variety of a good to a buyer endowed with a private binary signal on their relative quality. We analyze how the unique equilibrium of...

We interpret workers' confidence in their own skills as their morale, and investigate the implication of worker overconfidence on the firm's optimal wage-setting policies. In our model, wage contracts both provide incentives and affect worker morale, by revealing private information of the firm...

We analyze a stochastic equilibrium contract-posting model. Firms post employment contracts, wages contingent on all payoff-relevant states. Aggregate productivity is subject to persistent shocks. Both employed and unemployed workers search randomly for these contracts, and are free to quit at...

We study infinitely repeated games with observable actions, where players have present-biased (so-called beta-delta) preferences. We give a two-step procedure to characterize Strotz-Pollak equilibrium payoffs: compute the continuation payoff set using recursive techniques, and then use this set...

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...

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...

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...