We study a principal-agent model in which the agent can provide ex post additional relevant information regarding his performance. In particular, he can provide a legitimate excuse, that is, evidence that a poor result is only due to factors outside his control. However, building a convincing...

Two activists with correlated private positions in a firm's stock, trade sequentially before simultaneously exerting effort that determines the firm's value. We document the existence of a novel linear equilibrium in which an activist's trades have positive sensitivity to her block size, but...

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different,possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patternssimultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decisionmaking. In this paper we present a simple...