Knowledge that Transforms

We identify the inefficiencies that arise when negotiation between two parties takes place in the presence of transaction costs.First, for some values of these costs it is efficient to reach an agreement but the unique equilibrium outcome is one in which agreement is never reached.Secondly, even when there are equilibria in which an agreement is reached, we find that the model always has an eqilibrium in which agreement is never reached, as well as equilibria in which agreement is delayed for an arbitrary length of time.Finally, the only way in which the parties can reach an agreement in equilibrium is by using inefficient punishments for (some of) the opponent's deviations.We argue that this implies that, when the parties are given the opportunity to renegotiate out of these inefficiencies, the only equilibrium outcome which survives is the one in which agreement is never reached, regardless of the value of the transaction costs.

We prove a Folk Theorem for asynchronously repeated games in which the set of players who may not be able to change their actions simultaneously. We impose a condition, the finite periods of inaction (FPI) condition, which requires that the number of periods in which every player has at least one opportunity to move is bounded. Given the FPI condition together with the standard nonequivalent utilities (NEU) condition, we show that every feasible and strictly individually rational payoff vector can be supported as a subgame perfect equilibrium outcome of an asynchronously repeated game.

We study the implications of imperfect information for term structures of credit spreads on corporate bonds. We suppose that bond investors cannot observe the issuer’s assets directly, and receive instead only periodic and imperfect accounting reports. For a setting in which the assets of the firm are a geometric Brownian motion until informed equityholders optimally liquidate, we derive the conditional distribution of the assets, given accounting data and survivorship. Contrary to the perfect-information case, there exists a default-arrival intensity process. That intensity is calculated in terms of the conditional distribution of assets. Credit yield spreads are characterized in terms of accounting information. Generalizations are provided.

When individual statistics are aggregated through a strictly monotone function to an aggregate statistic, common knowledge of the value of the aggregate statistic does not imply, in general, that the individual statistics are either equal or constant. This paper discusses circumstances where constancy and equality both hold. The first case arises when partitions are independently drawn, and each individual's information is determined by their own partition and some public signal. In this case common knowledge of the value of the aggregator function implies (with probability one) that the individual statistics are constant, so that in the case where the individual statistics have the same expected value, they must all be equal. The second circumstance is where private statistics are related: affiliation of individual statistics and a lattice condition imply that the individual statistics are equal when the value of the aggregate statistic is common knowledge.

This paper compares two different models in a common environment. The first model has liquidity constraints in that consumers save a single asset that they cannot sell short. The second model has debt constraints in that consumers cannot borrow so much that they would want to default, but is otherwise a standard complete markets model. Both models share the features that individuals are unable to completely insure against idiosyncratic shocks and that interest rates are lower than subjective discount rates. In a stochastic environment, the two models have quite different dynamic properties, with the debt constrained model exhibiting simple stochastic steady states, while the liquidity constrained model has greater persistence of shocks.

In interim economies with asymmetric information, we show that the coarse core of Wilson (1978) does not converge to price equilibrium allocations as the economy is replicated.This failure of core convergence is a basic consequence of asymmetric information and extends to any reasonable notion of either (interim) core or price equilibrium. JEL Classification: C71, D51 Key Words: core, price equilibrium, asymmetric information, interim

A new method is proposed for constructing confidence intervals in autoregressive models with linear time trend. Interest focuses on the sum of the autoregressive coefficients because this parameter provides a useful scalar measure of the long-run persistence properties of an economic time series. Since the type of the limiting distribution of the corresponding OLS estimator, as well as the rate of its convergence, depend in a discontinuous fashion upon whether the true parameter is less than one or equal to one (that is, trend-stationary case or unit root case), the construction of confidence intervals is notoriously difficult. The crux of our method is to recompute the OLS estimator on smaller blocks of the observed data, according to the general subsampling idea of Politis and Romano (1994a), although some extensions of the standard theory are needed. The method is more general than previous approaches in that it works for arbitrary parameter values, but also because it allows the innovations to be'-a martingale difference sequence rather than i.i.d .. Some simulation studies examine the finite sample performance.

Consider nonempty finite pure strategy sets S1,…,Sn, let S=S1×⋅⋅⋅×Sn, let Ω be a finite space of “outcomes,” let Δ(Ω) be the set of probability distributions on Ω, and let θ: S→Δ(Ω) be a function. We study the conjecture that for any utility in a generic set of n-tuples of utilities on Ω there are finitely many distributions on Ω induced by the Nash equilibria of the game given by the induced utilities on S. We give a counterexample refuting the conjecture for n≥3. Several special cases of the conjecture follow from well known theorems, and we provide some generalizations of these results.