Economics Insights @ CBS

Information provision in games influences behavior by affecting agents' beliefs about the state, as well as their higher-order beliefs. We first characterize the extent to which a designer can manipulate agents' beliefs by disclosing information. We then describe the structure of optimal belief distributions, including a concave-envelope representation that subsumes the single-agent result of Kamenica and Gentzkow (2011). This result holds under various solution concepts and outcome selection rules.

We consider a portfolio selection problem for an investor who consumes at the end of a finite horizon. With important qualifications on the sufficiency part, we show that convergence of the optimal investment policy as the horizon becomes distant occurs if and only if the corresponding Arrow-Pratt coefficient of relative risk aversion converges as wealth increases. A major step in the proof shows that convergence of the Arrow-Pratt coefficient of relative risk aversion is equivalent to regular variation of the marginal utility function.

Economic frictions pervade the founding, financing, growing, and exiting of high-growth entrepreneurial firms. This chapter considers one friction that currently affects a small, but important, set of entrepreneurs: racial and gender discrimination. I first collect facts from a large empirical literature that show clear gender and race gaps in participation and financing of startups. Female founders manage 16-25% of all startups, while Black entrepreneurs rarely exceed 3% of the startup population.