This study examines the importance of idiosyncratic volatility in asset pricing for Australian stock returns from January 2002 to December 2010. Inspired by work from the early 1990s which found that portfolios constructed to mimic common risk factors explained significant variations in US stock...

Due to the well-known efficiency--rent extraction trade-off, the optimal mechanism in a pure screening environment (e.g., revenue maximization in auctions or cost minimization in procurement) typically calls for distortions in allocative efficiency when agents possess private information at the...

In this paper, we allow budget-augmenting negative prizes in all-pay auctions with incomplete information, which in general entail endogenous participation of contestants, and investigate effort-maximizing rank-order-based prize allocation rule. We find that at the optimum, the adoption of...