Recent disruptions to global supply chains have caused higher prices and shortages of essential goods, prompting many consumers to start stockpiling items they fear may become unavailable. This paper examines how consumer stockpiling affects a monopolist's pricing and inventory strategies during a supply disruption.

When consumers stockpile, firms face a challenge: if they keep prices low, consumers buy in bulk and store goods, anticipating future price hikes and shortages. In response, the firm may raise its price unpredictably to forestall stockpiling. This behavior results in an unstable situation where prices are raised randomly , and consumers continue to stockpile as long as prices are low.

While stockpiling helps consumers when storage costs are low, it can backfire if storage is expensive, leading to worse outcomes for them. Overall, stockpiling tends to lower societal well-being because it leads firms to raise prices too soon on average. Policies like price controls or rationing can’t fully fix these problems, but maintaining a strategic government reserve of goods can stabilize the market and benefit both consumers and firms.

This paper explores how firms compete when their usual supply of a key input is disrupted. Normally, firms can easily access this input and sell their products at low prices. However, when the supply of the input is suddenly cut off, they must rely on their existing stock to keep operating. This creates a dramatic shift in competition. During the disruption, firms face two competing strategies: lowering prices to attract customers now or raising prices to conserve inventory and potentially sell as a monopoly when competitors run out of stock. This second strategy—holding back inventory for later monopoly sales—leads to a sudden jump in prices when the disruption begins, and prices stay high until stocks are depleted.

These high prices are especially problematic when there are fewer firms or when firms have uneven stock levels. Policies like price caps can help consumers during the disruption but might discourage companies from preparing by building up inventory. Alternatively, encouraging inventory investment through subsidies or government stockpiles can provide better results, helping to stabilize prices and improve overall outcomes.

This study explores optimal project management strategies in environments where delays are frequent and unpredictable. In such settings, contractors can either hide delays through false reports or by postponing the disclosure of genuine setbacks. To address this, the project sponsor uses a soft deadline combined with an incentive structure that rewards early project completion, encouraging honest reporting and timely work. However, unexpected delays late in the project trigger a process where extensions are granted on an ad-hoc basis, with the possibility of inefficient cancellation if progress becomes untenable. As these extensions accumulate, the project’s schedule and budget can spiral out of control, potentially leading to cancellation even after significant investment. This research investigates the balance between inducing optimal performance, managing setbacks, and ensuring project success in the face of uncertainty.

This paper explores the interplay between fraud and trust in decision-making within a continuous-time reputation game. A decision-maker (the principal) wants to approve genuine projects while rejecting fraudulent ones. The project creator (the agent) may be either ethical: producing only real projects, or strategic: capable of creating both real and counterfeit projects. While real projects take an uncertain amount of time to develop, fake projects can be produced instantly, though at a cost.

In the unique equilibrium, there is an initial "phase of doubt" during which the strategic agent randomizes about counterfeiting while simultaneously searching for a genuine breakthrough.  During this period, the principal is uncertain and also randomizes about accepting any submitted project.  As the phase progresses, the principal becomes increasingly likely to approve submissions, eventually reaching full confidence in the agent's ethics. Only submissions made after this phase are guaranteed to benefit the principal.

The paper examines three ways to address this challenge:

1. Full Commitment: The principal commits in advance to a strategy that balances the risks of rejecting real projects and approving fake ones.

2. Delegation: Transferring approval authority to a slightly more cautious or less cautious proxy can help or harm the principal, depending on the proxy's behavior.

3. Auditing: The principal can use costly tests to verify projects before making a decision. Interestingly, the frequency of auditing can change over time, first increasing during the phase of doubt and then decreasing as the principal gains confidence.

These findings provide insights into how trust and fraud evolve in dynamic settings and how strategic tools can mitigate the associated risks.

This paper examines how job references affect incentives and overall welfare in a large economy with challenges like worker moral hazard, limited liability, job turnover, and structural unemployment. In the optimal scenario for firms, employers give references to workers when they perform successfully, and these workers are guaranteed jobs in the next period.

Compared to a system without job references:

- Workers are offered smaller bonuses but put in more effort; i.e., they "work for references".

- Firms earn higher profits, and overall economic output improves.

- However, individual workers, on average, are worse off.

Interestingly, firms don't fully account for how references motivate workers and could often boost both profits and welfare by collectively increasing the bonuses they offer. This highlights a missed opportunity to align firm and worker incentives for better outcomes. 

This paper explores how to design contracts that encourage an advisor (the agent) to provide guidance on how much a decision-maker (the principal) should invest in a project. Giving the advisor incentives to perform research, unfortunately creates incentives to distort her findings. Specifically, she will exaggerate the importance of her results in low-profit settings (e.g., academic research), and understate the significance of her findings in high-profit settings (e.g., corporate consulting).

To address this, the principal uses different strategies:

- For low-profit projects, the principal ignores extreme recommendations that might suggest overconfidence (dubbed "Young-Turk" recommendations).

- For high-profit projects, the principal disregards mild recommendations that might indicate excessive caution (dubbed "Yes-Man" recommendations).

The study extends this framework in three important ways:

1. It examines cases where research involves choosing among experiments with varying costs and levels of detail.

2. It considers projects with more than two possible outcomes beyond just success or failure.

3. It looks at situations where the profitability of investments can vary continuously rather than having only two fixed values.

While these extensions provide additional insights, the core findings of the baseline model remain robust across all these scenarios. This work sheds light on how to balance research incentives and accurate reporting in advisory relationships. 

This paper examines how organizations can motivate their members when monetary rewards and punishments are weak or infeasible. Members' efforts influence both their performance and the overall satisfaction of others in the organization, creating interdependent incentives. The organization can reward or punish members by offering them either a break from pressure after good performance or the threat of expulsion after poor performance.

The study identifies how to structure these incentives by determining the range of reputational "scores" (or continuation utilities) that best align with the organization's goals. It then designs a reputation system to track performance and implement these incentives effectively.

The findings have practical applications for labor-managed firms and gig-economy platforms, where reputation systems play a central role in motivating and retaining workers.