In this paper we examine the strategic savviness of the medieval church as portrayed in Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser. We show that the church employed an optimal randomization strategy based on arguments of dominance or trembling-hand perfection. Particular attention is paid to the employed...

We introduce a new model of aggregate information cascades where only one of two possible actions is observable to others. Agents make a binary decision in sequence. The order is random and agents are not aware of their own position in the sequence. When called upon, they are only informed about...

We examine the effects of different forms of feedback information on the performance of markets that suffer from moral hazard problems due to sequential exchange. As orthodox theory would predict, we find that providing buyers with information about sellers' trading history boosts market...

We use an RCT to analyse the impact of microcredit on poverty reduction in Bosnia. The study population are loan applicants that would normally have just been rejected based on regular screening. We find that access to credit allowed borrowers to start and expand small-scale businesses....

Although microfinance institutions across the world are moving from group lending towards individual lending, this strategic shift is not substantiated by sufficient empirical evidence on the impact of both types of lending on borrowers. We present such evidence from a randomised field...