The paper addresses the problem of optimally matching heterogeneous players in a two-stage two-type Lazear-Rosen tournament in which the semifinal losers are eliminated. The organizer of the tournament can either choose two homogeneous semifinals -- one between two strong players and the other...

We study the effect of secondary markets on equity-linked life insurance contracts with surrender guarantees. The policyholders are assumed to be boundedly rational in giving up their contracts, and a proportion of policyholders will access the secondary markets instead of surrendering the...

This paper analyzes truthtelling incentives in pre-vote communication in heterogeneous committees. We generalize the classical Condorcet jury model by introducing a new informational structure that captures consistency of information. In contrast to the impossibility result shown by Coughlan...

The paper analyzes how the choice of organizational structure leads to the best compromise between controlling behavior based on authority rights and minimizing costs for implementing high efforts. Concentrated delegation and hierarchical delegation turn out to be never an optimal compromise. If...

This paper explores the importance of shocks to consumer misperceptions, or "noise shocks", in a quantitative business cycle model. I embed imperfect information as in Lorenzoni (2009) into a new Keynesian model with price and wage rigidities. Agents learn about the components of labor...

The argument that policy risk, i.e. uncertainty about monetary and fiscal policy, has been holding back the economic recovery in the U.S. during the Great Recession has a large popular appeal. We analyze the role of policy risk in explaining business cycle fluctuations by using an estimated New...

Second price allpay auctions (wars of attritions) have an evolutionarily stable equilibrium in pure strategies if valuations are private information. I show that for any level of uncertainty there exists a pure deviation strategy close to the equilibrium strategy such that for some valuations...

This paper analyzes the contribution of anticipated capital and labor tax shocks to business cycle volatility in an estimated New Keynesian DSGE model. While fiscal policy accounts for 12 to 20 percent of output variance at business cycle frequencies, the anticipated component hardly matters for...

Many information structures generate correlated rather than mutually independent signals, the news media being a prime example. This paper shows experimentally that in such context many people neglect these correlations in the updating process and treat correlated information as independent. In...

In this note, a class of nonlinear dynamic models under rational expectations is studied. A particular solution is found using a model reference adaptive technique via an extended Kalman filtering algorithm, for which initial conditions knowledge only is required.