Because a money manager learns more about her skill from her management experience than outsiders can learn from her realized returns, she expects inefficiency in future contracts that condition exclusively on realized returns. A fund family that learns what the manager learns can reduce this...

When a collection of specialists organize as an exchange, each can reap net private benefits at the expense of the exchange by quoting a privately optimal pricing schedule. Coordination makes all specialists and customers better off, but requires a system of monitoring and punishment that breaks...

We develop a multiperiod market model describing both the process by which traders learn about their ability and how a bias in this learning can create overconfident traders. A trader in our model initially does not know his own ability. He infers this ability from his successes and failures. In...

We develop a theoretical model to analyze the effects of libertarian paternalism on information production and financial decision making. Individuals in our model appreciate the information content of the recommendations made by a social planner. This affects their incentive to gather...

This article develops a model of a self-fulfilling credit market freeze and uses it to study alternative governmental responses to such a crisis. We study an economy in which operating firms are interdependent, where their success depends on the ability of other operating firms to obtain...

Many economic agents take corrective actions based on information inferred from market prices of firms' securities. Examples include directors and activists intervening in the management of firms and bank supervisors taking actions to improve the health of financial institutions. We provide an...