[We present a model of corporate acquisitions in which initially uninformed bidders must incur costs to learn their (independent) valuations of a potential takeover target. The first bidder makes either a preemptive bid that will deter the second bidder from investigating or a lower bid that will induce the second bidder to investigate and possibly compete. We show that the expected price of the target may be higher when the first bidder makes a deterring bid than when there is competitive bidding. Hence, by weakening the first bidder's incentive to choose a preemptive bid, regulatory and management policies to assist competing bidders may reduce both the expected takeover price and social welfare.]

Trading costs, in the form either of explicit charges or of the costs of becoming informed, limit the participation of some classes of traders in commodity future markets. When speculators face a fixed cost of participating in a futures market that is used by commodity producers to hedge their stochastic revenues, the futures risk premium deviates from the perfect market prediction. The deviation rises in absolute value with the square root of the trading cost and with the standard deviation of residual returns, and it is unrelated to the covariance of the futures price with producers' nonmarketable wealths. The residual-risk premium depends not on the total magnitude of the risk that producers hedge (i.e., aggregate revenue variance), but on the variability of their revenue relative to its mean (i.e., the coefficient of variation). Hence, even a commodity that constitutes a minor fraction of aggregate consumption may have a large premium for residual risk if the revenue derived from it has a large coefficient of variation.

We provide a model in which a single psychological constraint, limited attention, explains both under- and overreaction to different earnings components. Investor neglect of earn-ings induces post-earnings announcement drift and the profit anomaly. Neglect of earnings components causes accrual and cash flow anomalies. The model offers empirical implica-tions relating the strength of earnings-related anomalies to the forecasting power of current earnings-related information for future earnings, investor attentiveness, and the volatilities of and correlation between accruals and cash flows. We also show that, owing to atten-tion costs, in equilibrium not all investors choose to attend to earnings or its components. (JEL G12, G14, M41, M43) Market reactions to earnings and earnings components present a striking puzzle. Stock prices on average underreact to earnings surprises (post-earnings an-nouncement drift), but overreact to the operating accruals component of earn-ings.1 Earnings- and accruals-related patterns of return predictability are often referred to as “anomalies, ” “under- ” and “overreaction, ” or reflecting investor “optimism, ” “pessimism, ” or “naı̈veté. ” Such labels offer little guidance as to

We model sequential bidding in a private value English auction when it is costly to submit or revise a bid. We show that, even when bid costs approach zero, bidding occurs in repeated jumps, consistent with certain types of natural auctions such as takeover contests. In contrast with most past models of bids as valuation signals, every bidder has the opportunity to signal and increase the bid by a jump. Jumps communicate bidders’ information rapidly, leading to contests that are completed in a few bids. The model additionally predicts; informative delays in the start of bidding; that the probability of a second bid decreases in, and the jump increases in, the first bid; that objects are sold to the highest valuation bidder; and that revenue and efficiency relationships between different auctions hold asymptotically.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at.

[We test whether and how equity overvaluation affects corporate financing decisions using an ex ante misvaluation measure that filters firm scale and growth prospects from market price. We find that equity issuance and total financing increase with equity overvaluation, but only among overvalued stocks, and that equity issuance is more sensitive than debt issuance to misvaluation. Consistent with managers catering to maintain overvaluation and with investment-scale economy effects, the sensitivity of equity issuance and total financing to misvaluation is stronger among firms with potential growth opportunities (low book-to-market, high R&D, or small size) and high share turnover.]

[We analyze capital allocation in a conglomerate where divisional managers with uncertain abilities compete for promotion to CEO. A manager can sometimes gain by unobservably adding variance to divisional performance. Capital rationing can limit this distortion, increase productive efficiency, and allow the owner to make more accurate promotion decisions. Firms for which CEO talent is more important for firm performance are more likely to ration capital. A rationed manager is more likely to be promoted even though all managers are identical ex ante. When the tournament payoff is relatively small, offering an incentive wage can be more efficient than rationing capital; however, when tournament incentives are paramount, rationing is more efficient.]

I discuss a new intellectual paradigm, social economics and finance —the study of the social processes that shape economic thinking and behavior. This emerging field recognizes that people observe and talk to each other. A key, underexploited building block of social economics and finance is social transmission bias : systematic directional shift in signals or ideas induced by social transactions. I use five “fables” (models) to illustrate the novelty and scope of the transmission bias approach, and offer several emergent themes. For example, social transmission bias compounds recursively, which can help explain booms, bubbles, return anomalies, and swings in economic sentiment.