Three essays on information and contracts

Abstract

This dissertation consists of one essay on the experiment and two on contracts. Chapter 2 studies the impact of cheap talk on price in a repeated Bertrand oligopoly experiment. Chapter 3 analyzes the factors determining whether the land is farmed by the owner or rented out under a cash rent or crop share contract, using panel data on a statistically representative sample of Iowa farmland parcels from 1997 to 2017. Chapter 4 examines how the mean and variance of expected farmland returns affect the terms of the contract from 2008 to 2019. Specifically, this paper uses a sample that includes operators with multiple contracts, so I can control for unobserved operator risk preferences and ability as a fixed effect.