Article history: Received 14 September 2010 Available online 22 August 2013 JEL classification: D86

Article history: Received 24 November 2015 Available online 27 December 2016 JEL classification: C72 C78 C92 D03 D86

In two-sided matching markets with contracts, the existence of stable outcomes can be guaranteed only under certain restrictions on preferences; the typical restriction is that all agents’ preferences are substitutable. We show that, in markets with a continuum of each type of agent, it is only necessary that agents on one side of the market have substitutable preferences to guarantee the exist...

Thinking about contingencies, designing covenants and seeing through their implications is costly. Parties to a contract accordingly use heuristics and leave it incomplete. The paper develops a model of limited cognition and examines its consequences for contractual design. JEL numbers: D23, D82, D86, L22.

This Online Appendix to the paper titled “Progressive Learning” presents the proof of Lemma 0, an extension of our equilibrium characterization allowing for mixed strategies, an analysis of the full commitment case, and details for Example 4 showing that path dependence can arise even when shocks are ergodic. JEL Classification Codes: C73, D86

We investigate a competitive labor market with team production. Workers differ in their motivation to exert team effort, and types are private information. We show that there can exist a separating equilibrium in which workers self-select into different firms and firms employing cooperative workers make strictly positive profits. Profit differences across firms persist because cooperation stric...

We propose a tractable model of asset management in which benchmarking arises endogenously, and analyze its welfare consequences. Fund managers' portfolios are not contractible they incur private costs running them. Incentive contracts for fund managers create pecuniary externality through their effect on prices. Benchmarking inflates prices creates crowded trades. The crowding reduces the effe...

This article considers the consequence of incomplete contracts that arise due to difficulties in precisely describing potentially relevant contingencies. Unlike much of the literature, this article concludes that the resulting incompleteness could often be immaterial with respect to economic efficiency. Indeed, attempts to “improve” matters by increasing the accuracy with which the courts deter...