Transparency of Information and Coordination in Economies with Investment Complementarities by George-Marios Angeletos and Alessandro Pavan. Published in volume 94, issue 2, pages 91-98 of American Economic Review, May 2004

We develop a dynamic theory of managerial turnover in a world in which the quality of the match between a firm and its managers changes stochastically over time. Shocks to managerial productivity are anticipated at the time of contracting but privately observed by the managers. Our key positive result shows that the firm’s optimal retention decisions become more permissive with time. Our key normative result shows that, compared to what is efficient, the firm’s contract induces either excessive retention at all tenure levels or excessive firing at the early stages of the relationship, followed by excessive retention after sufficiently long tenure.

Global games of regime change–coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it–have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We extend the static benchmark examined in the literature by allowing agents to take actions in many periods and to learn about the underlying fundamentals over time. We first provide a simple recursive algorithm for the characterization of monotone equilibria. We then show how the interaction of the knowledge that the regime survived past attacks with the arrival of information over time, or with changes in fundamentals, leads to interesting equilibrium properties. First, multiplicity may obtain under the same conditions on exogenous information that guarantee uniqueness in the static benchmark. Second, fundamentals may predict the eventual regime outcome but not the timing or the number of attacks. Finally, equilibrium dynamics can alternate between phases of tranquillity–where no attack is possible–and phases

This paper introduces signaling in a global game so as to examine the informational role of policy in coordination environments such as currency crises and bank runs. While exogenous asymmetric information has been shown to select a unique equilibrium, we show that the endogenous information generated by policy interventions leads to multiple equilibria. The policy maker is thus trapped into a position in which self-fulfilling expectations dictate not only the coordination outcome but also the optimal policy. This result does not rely on the freedom to choose out-of-equilibrium beliefs, nor on the policy being a public signal; it may obtain even if the policy is observed with idiosyncratic noise.

Matching theory typically assumes that agents know their values for possible partners and confines attention to settings in which matching is either static, or driven by population dynamics. In many environments of interest, instead, dynamics originate in the agents learning their preferences through interactions with other agents. In this short paper, we illustrate how platforms can use appropriately designed auctions to account for the joint value of experimentation and cross-subsidization in dynamic matching markets. The model is a stylized version of the general one in Fershtman and Pavan (2016).

We study optimal income taxation when workers’ productivity is stochastic and evolves endogenously because of learning by doing. Learning by doing calls for higher wedges and alters the relation between wedges and tax rates. In a calibrated model, we find that reforming the US tax code brings significant welfare gains and that a simple tax code invariant to past incomes is approximately optimal. We isolate the role of learning by doing by comparing the aforementioned tax code to its counterpart in an economy that is identical to the calibrated one except for the exogeneity of the productivity process. Ignoring learning by doing calls for fundamentally different proposals.

Abstract Entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are concerned about investors’ beliefs in asset markets because these beliefs shape the value of a potential IPO and the possibility to expand. Investors’ beliefs, on the other hand, can be influenced by start-up activity insofar as the latter contains valuable information about eventual profitability. This two-way feedback is shown to generate excessive, non-fundamental, waves in start-up activity, IPOs, and asset prices. Policies that “lean against the wind” can improve welfare, without requiring an informational advantage by the government.