The book-building procedure for selling initial public offerings to investors has captured significant market share from auction alternatives in recent years, despite significantly lower costs in both direct fees and initial underpricing when using the auction mechanism. This paper shows that in...

In 1997, France Telecom, the state-owned French telephone company, went through a partial privatization. We adapt a standard neoclassical model to predict how employees might respond to the firm's offer to sell them various classes of shares. Using a database that tracks over 200,000 eligible...

We examine the investment decision problem of a group whose members have heterogeneous time preferences. In particular, they have different discount factors for utility, possibly not exponential. We characterize the properties of efficient allocations of resources and of shadow prices that would...

This paper employs experiments to examine the effects of social comparisons in ultimatum bargaining. We inform responders on the average offer before they decide whether to accept or reject their specific offer. To provide a metric for social comparison effects, we compare them with another...