In this paper, we examine a supply chain in which a single supplier sells to a downstream newsvendor-type retailer. We make two assumptions that enrich this simple and well-understood model. First, we consider a multi-period model, in which the sequence of events is as follows. In a period, t,...

We study information acquisition and dynamic withdrawal decisions when a spreading rumor exposes a solvent bank to a run. Uncertainty about the bank's liquidity and potential failure motivates depositors who hear the rumor to acquire additional noisy signals. Depositors with less informative...

Global games of regime change -- that is, coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it -- have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We...

This paper shows that when donors and recipients care about each other --two-sided altruism -- the presence of asymmetry of information about the donor's income leads very naturally to a signaling game. A donor who cares about the recipient's welfare has incentives to appear richer than he is...

We analyze an infinite stage, alternating offer bargaining game in which the buyer knows the gains from trade but the seller does not. Under weak assumptions the game has a unique candidate Perfect Sequential Equilibrium, and it can be solved by backward induction. Equilibrium involves the...

We survey recent theoretical and empirical literature on political economics of non-democracies. Dictators face many challenges to their rule: internal, such as palace coups or breakdown of their support coalition, or external, such as mass protests or revolutions. We analyze strategic decisions...

We present a model of a financial market where some traders are "cursed" when choosing how much to invest in a risky asset, failing to fully take into account what prices convey about others' private information. Cursed traders put more weight on their private signals than rational traders. But...

A central result in the economic theory of liability is that, if an injurer's liability equals the victim's loss, then either the rule of strict liability or the rule of negligence can induce the injurer to behave properly. However, for this result to hold, the injurer must know the victim's...

We develop a theory of optimal financing for R&D-intensive firms that uses their unique features—large capital outlays, long gestation periods, high upside, and low probabilities of R&D success—that explains three prominent stylized facts about these firms: their relatively low use of debt,...

Credit market freezes in which debt issuance declines dramatically and market liquidity evaporates are typically observed during financial crises. In the financial crisis of 2008-09, the structured credit market froze, issuance of corporate bonds declined, and secondary credit markets became...