Crowdfunding provides innovation in enabling entrepreneurs to contract with consumers before investment. Under demand uncertainty, this improves screening for valuable projects. Entrepreneurial moral hazard threatens this benefit. Studying the trade-off between screening and moral hazard, the paper characterizes optimal mechanisms. Popular all-or-nothing reward-crowdfunding schemes reflect thei...

We offer a new perspective on games of irreversible investment under uncertainty in continuous time. The basis is a particular approach to solve the involved stochastic optimal control problems which allows to establish existence and uniqueness of an oligopolistic open loop equilibrium in a very general framework without reliance on any Markovian property. It simultaneously induces quite natura...

Despite restrictive migration policies, large numbers of undocumented migrants reside in many destination countries. If official migration targets are not enforced, why are they devised? To address this puzzle, we develop a political agency model with uncertainty about the supply of migrants, where an elected official can either have preferences congruent with the majority of his electorate, or...

Recent decision theories represent ambiguity via multiple priors, interpreted as alternative probabilistic models of the relevant uncertainty. This paper provides a robust behavioral foundation for this interpretation. A prior P is “plausible” if preferences over some subset of acts admit an expected utility representation with prior P , but not with any other prior Q 6= P . Under suitable axio...

Global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty with learning. We provide stochastic dominance theorems that provide new insights into when abatement and investment into low carbon technology should increase in risk. We show that R&D into low-carbon technologies and near-term abatement are in some sense opposites in terms of risk. Abatement provides insuran...

As a first step towards understanding the evolution of small groups in firms, this paper develops and tests a simple decision-theoretic model of research-unit evolution in which, as managers resolve their uncertainty over time, they shut down under-performing units and remove under-performing unit heads. The selection process generates several testable hypotheses about how unit and head charact...

Recent literature on optimal investment has stressed the difference between the impact of risk and the impact of ambiguity also called Knightian uncertainty on investors’ decisions. In this paper, we show that a decision maker’s attitude towards ambiguity is similarly crucial for investment decisions. We capture the investor’s individual ambiguity attitude by applying α-MEU preferences to a sta...

This paper examines return predictability when the investor is uncertain about the right state variables. A novel feature of the model averaging approach used in this paper is to account for finite-sample bias of the coefficients in the predictive regressions. Drawing on an extensive international dataset, we find that interest-rate related variables are usually among the most prominent predict...

In this paper we analyze the implementation of socially optimal mergers when the regulator is not informed about all parameters that determine social and private gains from potential mergers. We show that implementation requires a certain degree of agreement between social and private incentives. The most important example where this congruence is present is when the uncertainty refers to cost ...

This article analyses the advantages and disadvantages of the different patent systems that coexist in Europe and examines the recently launched proposal for a European Council Regulation on the Community patent in light of the shortcoming of the existing systems. The European Commission has sought the coexistent of the Community, European and national patent systems. This option does not elimi...