A strategy is obviously dominant if, for any deviation, at any information set where both strategies first diverge, the best outcome under the deviation is no better than the worst outcome under the dominant strategy. A mechanism is obviously strategy-proof (OSP) if it has an equilibrium in obviously dominant strategies. This has a behavioral interpretation: a strategy is obviously dominant if and only if a cognitively limited agent can recognize it as weakly dominant. It also has a classical interpretation: a choice rule is OSP-implementable if and only if it can be carried out by a social planner under a particular regime of partial commitment.

I propose a new solution concept, obvious ex post (OXP) equilibrium. This is a formal standard of cognitive simplicity for mechanisms, in settings with interdependent values. Under some standard assumptions, the ascending auction has an efficient OXP equilibrium. I discuss a decision theoretic foundation for OXP mechanisms.

High growth rate of labor hours per worker signals low future stock returns and high future hiring rate. As labor hours are substituted for hiring, hiring becomes less responsive to future discount rate. The growth rate of the number of labor hours per worker does not appear to be related to future profitability. Our findings are largely consistent with a dynamic labor hours asset pricing model that features large asymmetric costs in adjusting the number of workers and small costs in adjusting the number of hours per worker.

We explore subjective performance reviews in long-term employment relationships. We show that firms benefit from separating the task of evaluating the worker from the task of paying him. The separation allows the reviewer to better manage the review process, and can, therefore, reward the worker for his good performance with not only a good review contemporaneously, but also a promise of better review in the future. Such reviews spread the reward for the worker’s good performance across time and lower the firm’s maximal temptation to renege on the reward. The manner in which information is managed exhibits patterns consistent with a number of well-documented biases in performance reviews.

This study examines the information environment and earnings management of dual class firms. Motivated by the pronounced entrenchment phenomenon at dual class firms due to divergence between voting and cash flow rights, we are interested in whether dual class firms adopt corporate disclosure choices that imply greater opacity as well as employ judgment in financing reporting to misguide the outside shareholders about the firm’s true performance. Based on a sample of 12,672 firms from 19 countries during 1994–2010, we find that dual class status is associated with poorer information environment and increased accrual-based earnings management, consistent with the notion that managers of dual class firms exhibit incentives to conceal private control benefits from the outside shareholders. Results further suggest that dual class ownership structure weakens the mitigating impact of investor protection on earnings management. Following unification, firms experience an improvement in information environment and a decrease in earnings manipulation.

A seller designs a mechanism to sell a single object to a potential buyer whose private type is his incomplete information about his valuation. The seller can disclose additional information to the buyer about his valuation without observing its realization. In both discrete-type and continuous-type settings, we show that discriminatory disclosure—releasing different amounts of additional information to different buyer types—dominates full disclosure in terms of seller revenue. An implication is that the orthogonal decomposition technique, while an important tool in dynamic mechanism design, is generally invalid when information disclosure is part of the design.

We examine the relation between earnings smoothing and stock price crash risk to evaluate the role of earnings smoothing on the downside risk of equity values. We find that, within firm, a higher degree of earnings smoothing is associated with greater crash risk; and this association, in the cross-section, is more pronounced for firms with fewer analysts following, smaller institutional holdings, and positive cumulative discretionary accruals. We also use stock returns to assess the economic significance of our results. We find that, controlling for firm fixed effects, earnings smoothing is associated with sizable negative returns in the quarter following the earnings announcement. Our findings caution investors about the downside risk of firms reporting smooth earnings, in contrast to the conventional belief that these firms are low in equity risk.