De-synchornized Clocks in Preemption Games with Risky Prospects

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 a player's equilibrium expected expenditures and the measure of his competitors. This result no longer holds when the increase in the measure of players leads to a decrease in the degree of clock synchronization in the game. We show that the result reemerges if information arrives only at discrete times, and thus, a player's strategic beliefs are updated between decision times in a measurably meaningful way

Information acquisition and innovation under competitive pressure

This paper studies information acquisition under competitive pressure and proposes a model to examine the relationship between product market competition and the level of innovative activity in an industry. Our paper offers theoretical support for recent empirical results that point to an inverted-U shape relationship between competition and innovation. The model presents an optimal timing decision problem where a firm endowed with an idea trades the benefits of waiting for additional information on whether this idea can be converted into a successful project against the cost of delaying innovation: a given firm's profit following innovation is decreasing in the number of firms that invested at earlier dates. By recognizing that a firm can intensify its innovative activity on two dimensions, a risk dimension and a quantitative dimension, we show that firms solve this trade-off precisely so as to generate the inverted-U shape relationship

Imperfect Evaluation in Project Screening

This paper studies a model in which an agent considers proposing a project of unknown quality to an evaluator, who decides whether or not to accept it. First, we show that there exist instances where an agent with a better track record of producing high-quality projects should be subjected to more stringent standards. Second, we show that an increase in the submission fee may lead to a decrease in the quality of projects that are implemented because of its effects on the evaluator's acceptance policy

A Reference Dependent Representation with Subjective Tastes

Experimental and empirical evidence documents instances where the presence of an inferior option in a menu increases the attractiveness of the better options from that menu and thus distorts the normative ranking across menus. We analyze the case when besides this so called context effects bias there is also a concern for flexibility in the spirit of the literature initiated by Kreps (1979) and Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini (2001). Since the context effects bias and the desire for flexibility both increase the inclination of a decision maker to choose larger menus, the analysis allows the disentangling of the effect of the behavioral bias from the effect of the rational desire from flexibility. We find a weak condition on the set of ex post preferences under which the two effects are identifiable. We show that our representation is essentially unique. From a pedagogical viewpoint, our paper provides a novel methodology of identifying probabilities on the state space of subjective uncertainty introduced by Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini (2001) when this state space is infinite. This method renders the infinite state space essentially finite with respect to a certain salient property

Information Acquisition and Innovation under Competitive Pressure

This paper studies information acquisition under competitive pressure and proposes a model to examine the relationship between product market competition and the level of innovative activity in an industry. Recent empirical papers point to an inverted-U shape relationship between competition and innovation. Our paper offers theoretical support to these results while employing a more accurate definition of innovation than the previous literature; more precisely, we isolate innovation from riskless technological progress. The firms in our model learn of an invention and decide on whether and when to innovate. In making this decision, firms face a trade-off between seeking a first-mover advantage and waiting to acquire more information. By recognizing that a firm can intensify its innovative activity on two dimensions, a temporal and a quantitative one, we show that firms solve this trade-off precisely so as to generate the inverted-U shape relationship. When the competition in the pre innovation market is sufficiently high, the level of competition in the post innovation market is endogenous. We investigate the welfare effects of innovation under competitive pressure and find conditions that determine the socially optimal level of competition. We study the effects that the degree of technological spread in the industry has on innovation and highlight the roles that strategic uncertainty and the discreteness of the information acquisition process play in this context

Information Acquisition and Innovation under Competitive Pressure

This paper studies information acquisition under competitive pressure and proposes a model to examine the relationship between product market competition and the level of innovative activity in an industry. Recent empirical papers point to an inverted-U shape relationship between competition and innovation. Our paper offers theoretical support to these results while employing a more accurate definition of innovation than the previous literature; more precisely, we isolate innovation from riskless technological progress. The firms in our model learn of an invention and decide on whether and when to innovate. In making this decision, firms face a trade-off between seeking a first-mover advantage and waiting to acquire more information. By recognizing that a firm can intensify its innovative activity on two dimensions, a temporal and a quantitative one, we show that firms solve this trade-off precisely so as to generate the inverted-U shape relationship. When the competition in the pre innovation market is sufficiently high, the level of competition in the post innovation market is endogenous. We investigate the welfare effects of innovation under competitive pressure and find conditions that determine the socially optimal level of competition. We study the effects that the degree of technological spread in the industry has on innovation and highlight the roles that strategic uncertainty and the discreteness of the information acquisition process play in this context

De-synchornized Clocks in Preemption Games with Risky Prospects

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 a player's equilibrium expected expenditures and the measure of his competitors. This result no longer holds when the increase in the measure of players leads to a decrease in the degree of clock synchronization in the game. We show that the result reemerges if information arrives only at discrete times, and thus, a player's strategic beliefs are updated between decision times in a measurably meaningful way

A Reference Dependent Representation with Subjective Tastes

Experimental and empirical evidence documents instances where the presence of an inferior option in a menu increases the attractiveness of the better options from that menu and thus distorts the normative ranking across menus. We analyze the case when besides this so called context effects bias there is also a concern for flexibility in the spirit of the literature initiated by Kreps (1979) and Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini (2001). Since the context effects bias and the desire for flexibility both increase the inclination of a decision maker to choose larger menus, the analysis allows the disentangling of the effect of the behavioral bias from the effect of the rational desire from flexibility. We find a weak condition on the set of ex post preferences under which the two effects are identifiable. We show that our representation is essentially unique