This paper studies a financial contracting problem where a firm privately observes its cash flow and faces a limited liability constraint. The firm's collateral is piecemeal divisible and can only be liquidated continuously by resorting to the service of a costly third party, typically...

People often forget and sometimes fantasize. This paper reports a large-scale experiment on memory errors and their relation to preferential traits including time preference, attitudes toward risk and ambiguity, and psychological characteristics such as anticipatory feelings. We observe...

This paper provides an economic rationale for overachieving behavior in non-professional activities in the labour market. The intrinsically motivated worker uses his achievement in the non-professional activity to signal his work ethic. When the worker‘s career concern is weak, he exerts no...

This paper experimentally explores how compositional grammars in artificial codes emerge and are sustained. In a pure coordination game with no conflict of interest, the sender sends a message that is an arbitrary string from available symbols with no prior meaning to indicate an abstract...

The sunk cost effect has been widely observed in individual decisions. Building on an intra-personal self-management game, the paper theoretically shows that the sunk cost effect may stem from an attempt to overcome the under-investment problem associated with a high degree of present bias or to...

We incorporate unawareness into the delegation problem between a financial expert and an investor, and study their pre-delegation communication. The expert has superior awareness of the possible states of the world, and decides whether to reveal some of them to the investor. We find that the...

The paper points out a potential gap between intertemporal choices and time preference: The observed intertemporal decisions could be partly driven by a biased perception of time, and thus may not completely reveal the actual time preference. To test this conjecture, we explore the relationship...