Real Options in a Dynamic Agency Model, with Applications to Financial Development, IPOs, and Business Risk

We study investment options in a dynamic agency model. Moral hazard creates an option to wait and agency conflicts affect the timing of investment. The model sheds light, theoretically and quantitatively, on the evolution of firms' dynamics, in particular the decline of the failure rate and the decrease in the age of IPOs.

The role of information in repeated games with frequent actions

We show that the ways incentives can be provided during dynamic interaction depend very crucially on the manner in which players learn information. This conclusion is established in a general stationary environment with noisy public monitoring and frequent actions. The monitoring process can be represented by a sum of a multi-dimensional Brownian component and a jump process. We show that jumps can be used to provide incentives both with transfers and value burning while continuous information can be used to provide incentives only with transfers. Also, it is asymptotically optimal to use the cumulative realization of the Brownian component linearly. Additionally, we approximate the equilibrium payoff set for fixed small discount rates as the periods become short by a series of linear programming problems. These problems highlight how the two types of information can be used to provide incentives.repeated games, dynamic incentives, frequent moves

Real Options in a Dynamic Agency Model, with Applications to Financial Development, IPOs, and Business Risk

We study investment options in a dynamic agency model. Moral hazard creates an option to wait and agency conflicts affect the timing of investment. The model sheds light, theoretically and quantitatively, on the evolution of firms’ dynamics, in particular the decline of the failure rate and the decrease in the age of IPOs

Reputation Effects and Equilibrium Degeneracy in Continuous-Time Games

We study a class of continuous-time reputation games between a large player and a population of small players in which the actions of the large player are imperfectly observable. The large player is either a normal type, who behaves strategically, or a behavioral type, who is committed to playing a certain strategy. We provide a complete characterization of the set of sequential equilibrium payoffs of the large player using an ordinary differential equation. In addition, we identify a sufficient condition for the sequential equilibrium to be unique and Markovian in the small players’ posterior belief. An implication of our characterization is that when the small players are certain that they are facing the normal type, intertemporal incentives are trivial: the set of equilibrium payoffs of the large player coincides with the convex hull of the set of static Nash equilibrium payoffs

Real Options in a Dynamic Agency Model, with Applications to Financial Development, IPOs, and Business Risk

We study investment options in a dynamic agency model. Moral hazard creates an option to wait and agency conflicts affect the timing of investment. The model sheds light, theoretically and quantitatively, on the evolution of firms’ dynamics, in particular the decline of the failure rate and the decrease in the age of IPOs