Nonrevealing Equilibria and Consumption-Based Asset Pricing Models

In the rational expectations equilibrium of this paper, agents have private information and differing information partitions and therefore assign differing conditional distributions to asset payoffs and other economic variables relevant to their investment choices. Standard asset pricing models typically do not recognize the impact of these differing information partitions, and empirical tests based on these models thus measure asset riskiness in a way that may not be relevant to any of the agents' decisions. I show how this can lead to distorted estimates of investment risk and how it can make the equity premium appear difficult to explain.

Equilibrium Uniqueness in a Cournot Model with Demand Uncertainty

If Cournot oligopolists face uncertainty about the intercept of a linear demand function and if the realized market price must be non-negative, then expected demand becomes convex, which can create a multiplicity of equilibria. This note shows that if the distribution of the demand intercept has a monotone hazard rate and if another, rather weak, assumption is satisfied, then uniqueness of equilibrium is guaranteed.

Monopoly Pricing over Time and the Timing of Investments

We consider a monopoly producing a good whose demand grows over time. Whatever the price policy which is adopted, the monopolist invests in order to meet the resulting demand growth. She can only invest in indivisible factory units. We identify the optimal price policy, and the ensuing optimal sequence of investment time points the monopoly selects through time. We show that this sequence satisfies the constant cycle property observed under capacity expansion for an exogenous increase in demand (Manne, 1961).

On the Signalling Role of Debt Maturity

This paper focuses on the signalling role of debt maturity. The main novelty of the paper is that it analyzes a setting in which high quality firms use collateral as a complementary device along with debt maturity to signal their superiority. Model simulations suggest a non-monotonic relationship between firm quality and debt maturity, in which high quality firms have both long-term secured debt and short-term secured or non-secured debt and low quality firms have long-term unsecured debt. We provide some empirical evidence for this result based on debt contracts of the Asia Commercial Bank.

Rational Sabotage in Cooperative Production with Heterogeneous Agents

We present a model of cooperative production in which rational agents might carry out sabotage activities that decrease output. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a Nash equilibrium without sabotage. It is shown that the absence of sabotage in equilibrium depends on the interplay between technology, relative productivity of agents and the degree of meritocracy. In particular we show that, ceteris paribus, meritocratic systems give more incentives to sabotage than egalitarian systems.

Rat Races and Glass Ceilings

In an ongoing organization, such as a large law partnership firm, employees are motivated not only by current rewards but also by the prospect of promotion, and the opportunity to make the rules in the future. This leads to a recursive contract design problem in an overlapping generations environment, where current agents may become future principals. The principal offers, and promotion-motivated agents accept, harsh rat race contracts with low wages and high effort levels. Hiring and promotion probabilities emerge as the preferred instrument to screen high cost workers, who face employment barriers and a glass ceiling.

On the Number of Contestants and Equilibrium Individual Effort

This paper shows that in a contest with the "Tullock" forms of contest success function, an increase in the number of contestants always reduces individual effort. However, when the outcome of the contest is governed by a noisy function of effort, then individual effort could either increase or decrease following an increase in the number of contestants, depending on whether the density function of the shock is upward or downward sloping.

Fundamental and Secondary R&D Races

R&D is typically characterized by uncertainty about the existence and timing of the innovation (``fundamental R&D"). I show that these uncertainties dampen R&D investment, which may exhibit non-monotonic dynamics, possibly converging to a steady state level. In fundamental R&D, increased rivalry raises investment in the short run, but dampens it in the long run. With an endogenous market structure and free entry, perfect competition ensues, where the race lasts for an instant; with costly entry, firms engage in R&D only if they’re sufficiently optimistic that the innovation exists. Previous models of R&D races, which assume timing uncertainty (``secondary R&D"), are special cases of this model, which allows for a comparative analysis of fundamental and secondary R&D race environments.

Endogenous Favoritism in Organizations

This paper shows that favoritism can arise endogenously as an optimal decision rule in a symmetric model with an ex-ante impartial principal. Furthermore, favoritism dominates fairness specifically when the favorite promotes his own idea and ignores the other's idea so that the non-favorite loses motivation. Our model also provides new insights on hierarchical communication structure and group authority.

Pareto Improving Lotteries and Voluntary Public Goods Provision

This paper characterizes the utility possibility frontier resulting in a model of private voluntary provision of a public good. It is shown that ex-ante lotteries over resource distributions among the agents can be Pareto improving. A corollary is that an equal distribution of resources among the agents, or any distribution where all agents contribute in equilibrium, is always Pareto dominated by a lottery between two unequal distributions.