When a product of uncertain quality is first introduced, consumers may be enticed to strategically delay their purchasing decisions in anticipation of the product reviews of their peers. This paper investigates how the presence of social learning interacts with the adoption decisions of strategic consumers and the dynamicpricing decisions of a monopolist firm, within a simple two-period model. ...

This paper studies asymmetric first-price menu auctions in the procurement environment where the buyer does not commit to a decision rule and asymmetric sellers have interdependent costs and statistically affiliated signals. Sellers compete in bidding a menu of contracts, where a contract specifies a vector of characteristics and a payment required from the buyer for delivering these characteri...

1 In an exam-based school choice matching mechanism (e.g., China’s college admission), student exam scores are used to determine school priorities. However, a student’s true qualifications or ability may not be perfectly revealed by his/her exam score. The matching outcome can thus be undesirable in the sense that it is not ex-ante fair, i.e., it may not match students with higher intrinsic abi...

This paper presents a principal-agent model of IMF conditional lending, in the aftermath of a “capital-account” liquidity crisis. We show that traditional ex-post conditionality can be e¤ective in safeguarding the Fund’s resources, allowing for the provision of e¢cient emergency lending and reducing ine¢cient ex-ante credit rationing if the capital out‡ow which triggers the crisis is not excess...

This paper examines multiple contract design choices in the context of transaction and relational attributes and consequent ex ante and ex post transaction costs. It focuses on two understudied themes in the IT outsourcing literature. First, while the literature is predominantly concerned with opportunism and consequent ex post hazard costs that contracts can safeguard against, parties to a con...

We study the incentives of two competing firms — the building block of any supply chain with downstream competition — to exchange private demand signals when demand is uncertain. The novelty and fundamental contribution of our paper lies in its consideration of ex–post or strategic information sharing, where the decision to share or to conceal a private demand signal is made after observing the...

This study compares ex ante estimates of the direct costs of individual regulations to ex post assessments of the same regulations. Our review of more than two dozen environmental and occupational safety regulations indicates that ex ante estimates of total (direct) costs have tended to exceed actuals. We find this to be true of 12 of the 25 rules in our data set, while for only 6 were the ex a...