Prior research on “strategic voting” has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...

This paper concerns multistage games, with and without discounting, in which each player can increase the level of an action over time so as to increase the other players’ future payoffs. An action profile is achievable if it is the limit point of a subgame perfect equilibrium path. Necessary...

A monotone game is a multistage game in which no player can lower her action in any period below its previous level. A motivation for the monotone games of this paper is dynamic voluntary contribution to a public project. Each player's utility is a strictly concave function of the public good,...

This paper studies a class of dynamic voluntary contribution games in a setting with discounting and neoclassical payoffs (differentiable, strictly concave in the public good, and quasilinear in the private good). An achievable profile is the limit point of a subgame perfect equilibrium path --...

We formulate a notion of stable outcomes in matching problems with one-sided asymmetric information. The key conceptual problem is to formulate a notion of a blocking pair that takes account of the inferences that the uninformed agent might make from the hypothesis that the current allocation is...

Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only...

There is ample evidence that emotions affect performance. Positive emotions can improve performance, while negative ones may diminish it. For example, the fears induced by the possibility of failure or of negative evaluations have physiological consequences (shaking, loss of concentration) that...

Economic theory reduces the concept of rationality to internal consistency. As far as beliefs are concerned, rationality is equated with having a prior belief over a “Grand State Space”, describing all possible sources of uncertainties. We argue that this notion is too weak in some senses...

We explore entry into a foreign market with uncertain demand growth. A multinational can serve the foreign demand by two modes, or by a combination thereof: it can export its products, or it can create productive capacity via Foreign Direct Investment. The advantage of FDI is that it allows for...

This paper studies a search model of the labor market where firms have private information about the quality of their vacancies, they can costlessly communicate with unemployed workers before the beginning of the application process, but the content of the communication does not constitute a...