We derive a general expression for the value of information to a price-taking investor in a dynamic environment and provide a framework for its estimation from option prices. We study the value of both private and public information and break it down into its instrumental and psychic parts. We apply this framework and estimate that a consumer-investor with commonlyused preference parameters wou...

We study a model of non-Bayesian updating, based on the Hypothesis Testing model of Ortoleva (2012), for ambiguity averse agents. Agents ranks acts following the MaxMin Expected Utility model of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) and when they receive new information they update their set of priors as follows: If the information is such that all priors in the original set of priors assign to it a pro...

Charities often devise fund-raising strategies that exploit natural human competitiveness in combination with the desire for public recognition. We explore whether institutions promoting competition can affect altruistic giving even when possibilities for public acclaim are minimal. In a controlled laboratory experiment based on a sequential “dictator game”, we find that subjects tend to give m...

We study an optimal timing decision problem where an agent endowed with a risky investment opportunity trades the benefits of waiting for additional information against a potential loss in first-mover advantage. The players’ clocks are de-synchronized in that they learn of the investment opportunity at different times. Previous literature has uncovered an inverted-U shaped relationship between ...

This paper introduces general games with incomplete information in which the number, as well as the types or identities, of the participating players are determined by chance and might not be known to the players when they make their choices of actions. In these games, the selection of the number and types of players is modeled as a finite point process on a suitable type space. Definitions of ...

This paper reports 45 laboratory duopoly markets that examine the importance of information sharing in facilitating tacit collusion under conditions of demand uncertainty. Sellers in these repeated laboratory markets generally shared information when possible to reduce their demand uncertainty, which led to output reductions in some demand states. Risk aversion is a likely explanation for this ...

Rational herd behavior and informationally efficient security prices have long been considered to be mutually exclusive but for exceptional cases. In this paper we describe the conditions on the underlying information structure that are necessary and sufficient for informational herding and contrarianism. In a standard sequential security trading model, subject to sufficient noise trading, peop...

Background risk can influence the performance of insurance markets that must deal with adverse selection when applicants are risk vulnerable, since they are more averse to bearing the insurable risk as a result of their exposures to background risk. We show that background risk always results in a lower deductible for the incentive constrained contract, and that a broader range of markets attai...

We examine the role of information-based stock trading in affecting the risk-incentive relation. By incorporating an endogenous informed trading into an optimal incentive contracting model, we analytically show that, apart from reducing incentives, a greater risk increases the level of information-based trading which consequently enhances executive incentives and offsets the negative risk-incen...

Rational herd behaviour and informationally efficient security prices have long been considered to be mutually exclusive but for exceptional cases. In this paper we describe the conditions on the underlying information structure that are necessary and sufficient for informational herding and contrarianism. In a standard sequential security trading model, subject to sufficient noise trading, peo...