I develop a model of group decision-making, in which a committee generates proposals and holds open discussions, but the ultimate decision is either taken by a leader (decision by authority) or by majority vote. Optimal communication processes are studied that combine both cheap talk statements...

The phenomenon of choice shifts in group decision-making is fairly ubiquitous in the social psychology literature. Faced with a choice between a ‘safe’ and ‘risky’ decision, group members appear to move to one extreme or the other, relative to the choices each member might have made...

We use a controlled economic experiment to examine the implications of asymmetric information for informational linkages between a stock market and a traded call option on that stock. The setting is based on the Kyle model and Back (1993). We find that an insider trades aggressively in both the...

There is strong evidence that people exploit their bargaining power in competitive markets but not in bilateral bargaining situations. There is also strong evidence that people exploit free-riding opportunities in voluntary cooperation games. Yet, when they are given the opportunity to punish...

In almost all European Union countries, the gender wage gap is increasing across the wages distribution. In this lecture I briefly survey some recent studies aiming to explain why apparently identical women and men receive such different returns and focus especially on those incorporating...

We design an experiment to study the effects of social identity on preferences over redistribution. The experiment highlights the trade-off between social identity concerns and maximization of monetary payoffs. Subjects belonging to two distinct natural groups are randomly assigned gross incomes...

This paper studies the effects that the revelation of information on the electorate's preferences has on voters' turnout decisions. The experimental data show that closeness in the division of preferences induces a significant increase in turnout. Moreover, for closely divided electorates (and...

We investigate, in a simple bilateral bargaining environment, the extent to which asymmetric information can induce individuals to engage in exchange where trade is not mutually profitable. We first establish a no-trade theorem for this environment. A laboratory experiment is conducted, where...

This Paper studies budget processes, both theoretically and experimentally. We compare the outcomes of bottom-up and top-down budget processes. It is often presumed that a top-down budget process leads to a smaller overall budget than a bottom-up budget process. We show, using structurally...