This paper demonstrates that a misspecified model of information processing interferes with long-run learning and offers an explanation for why individuals may continue to choose an inefficient action, despite sufficient public information to learn the true state. I consider a social learning...

Asymmetric information is an important source of inefficiency when an asset (such as a firm) is transacted. The two main sources of this asymmetry are the unobserved idiosyncratic characteristics of the asset (such as future profitability) and unobserved idiosyncratic choices (like secret price...

We study dynamic bargaining with uncertainty over the buyer's valuation and the seller's outside option. A long-lived seller makes offers to a long-lived buyer whose value is private information. There may exist a short-lived buyer whose value is higher than that of the long-lived buyer. The...

Asymmetric information is an important source of inefficiency when an asset (such as a firm) is transacted. The two main sources of this asymmetry are the unobserved idiosyncratic characteristics of the asset (such as future profitability) and unobserved idiosyncratic choices (like secret price...

We study market breakdown in a finance context under extreme adverse selection with and without competitive pricing. Adverse selection is extreme if for any price there are informed agent types with whom uninformed agents prefer not to trade. Market breakdown occurs when no trade is the only...

I develop a set-theoretic model of unawareness without making any structural assumptions on the underlying state space. Unawareness is characterized as a measurability constraint that results in players' reasoning about a “coarse" subjective algebra of events. The model is shown to be...

I construct a state space model with unawareness following Aumann (1976). Dekel, Lipman and Rustichini (1998a) show that standard state space models are incapable of representing unawareness. The model circumvents the impossibility result by endowing the agent with a subjective state space that...

This paper extends Li (2008b) to the multi-agent environment, where players reason about each other’s awareness as well as knowledge, subject to their own awareness constraints. I characterize the interactive knowledge hierarchies under unawareness, which significantly differ from those in the...

Consider two agents who learn the value of an unknown parameter by observing a sequence of private signals. The signals are independent and identically distributed across time but not necessarily across agents. We show that that when each agent's signal space is finite, the agents will commonly...

I study how choice behavior given unawareness of an event differs from choice behavior given subjective belief of zero probability on that event. Depending on different types of unawareness the decision-maker suffers, behavior under unawareness is either incomparable with that under zero...