[We model how three groups—insiders in existing public companies, institutional investors, and entrepreneurs planning to take firms public—compete for influence over politicians setting the level of investor protection. We identify factors that push toward suboptimal investor protection, including corporate insiders' ability to use public firms' assets to influence politicians, and institutional investors' inability to capture fully the value of investor protection for outside investors. Entrepreneurs and public firms' interest in raising equity capital does not fully eliminate the distortions arising from insiders seeking to extract rents from capital in place. Our analysis produces many testable predictions concerning how investor protection varies over time and around the world.]

We show that in public good problems under asymmetric information, the success of voluntary bargaining is closely related to the structure of property rights. We characterize property rights structures and mediated bargaining procedures that either lead to an efficient voluntary resolution to public good problems, or achieve the efficient outcome but slightly coerce the agents into participation. In this respect, we identify “efficient” property rights structures.

We model how lobbying by interest groups affects the level of investor protection. In our model, insiders in existing public companies, institutional investors (financial intermediaries), and entrepreneurs who plan to take companies public in the future, compete for influence over the politicians setting the level of investor protection. We identify conditions under which this lobbying game has an inefficiently low equilibrium level of investor protection. Factors that operate to reduce investor protection below its efficient level include the ability of corporate insiders to use the corporate assets they control to influence politicians, as well as the inability of institutional investors to capture the full value that efficient investor protection would produce for outside investors. The interest that entrepreneurs (and existing public firms) have in raising equity capital in the future reduces but does not eliminate the distortions arising from insiders' interest in extracting rents from the capital public firms already have. Our analysis generates testable predictions, and can explain existing empirical evidence, regarding the way in which investor protection varies over time and around the world.

We study the circumstances under which public pressure affects judging. We show that crowd pressure biases decisions in favor of the crowd for “subjective decisions” with respect to which the judge has more discretion but not for “objective decisions.” The bias is strengthened after a judge's error against the crowd and when errors are costlier to the crowd. We use data about referees' decisions and errors from the Bundesliga. We exploit three regimes where, due to the introduction of Video Assistance Refereeing (VAR) and COVID-19, both crowd pressure and the likelihood of errors vary.

We present a model of anonymous collective bargaining where individuals' preferences and information may be significantly interdependent. We show that the bargaining outcome becomes independent of individuals' preferences and information as the bargaining group increases in size. As a corollary, we show that anonymous voluntary bargaining completely fails in large groups. Either the difference between the bargaining outcome and the status quo vanishes as the size of the group becomes larger, or, the bargaining becomes coercive and results in a violation of at least some individuals' rights. The result provides a rationale for the inherent difficulty of reform in the presence of asymmetric information. “There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.” Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)

A number of studies, most notably Crémer and McLean (1985, 1988), have shown that in generic type spaces that admit a common prior and are of a fixed finite size, an uninformed seller can design mechanisms that extract all the surplus from privately informed bidders. We show that this result hinges on the nonconvexity of such a family of priors. When the ambient family of priors is convex, generic priors do not allow for full surplus extraction provided that for at least one prior in this family, players' beliefs about other players' types do not pin down the players' own preferences. In particular, full surplus extraction is generically impossible in finite type spaces with a common prior. Similarly, generic priors on the universal type space do not allow for full surplus extraction.