Many models in the economics literature deal with strategic situations with privately informed agents. In those models the information structure is assumed to be exogenous and common knowledge. We consider whether such models, and the results they produce, are robust with respect the...

This paper analyzes the role of retaliation in trade agreements. It shows that, in the presence of private information, retaliation can always be used to increase the welfare derived from such agreements by the participating governments. In particular, it is shown that retaliation is a necessary...

Traditional economic wisdom says that free entry in a market will drive profits down to zero. This conclusion is usually drawn under the assumption of perfect information. We assume that a priori there exists imperfect information about the profitability of the market, but that potential...

Two-stage game models of information acquisition in stochastic oligopolies require the unrealistic assumption that firms observe the precision of information chosen by their competitors before determining quantities. This paper analyzes secret information acquisition as a one-stage game....

We perform an experiment on a pure coordination game with uncertainty about the payoffs. Our game is closely related to models that have been used in many macroeconomic and financial applications to solve problems of equilibrium indeterminacy. In our experiment each subject receives a noisy...

We extend Aumann's [3] theorem, deriving correlated equilibria as a consequence of common priors and common knowledge of rationality, by explicitly allowing for non-rational behavior. We replace the assumption of common knowledge of rationality with a substantially weaker one, joint p-belief of...

We study an interactive framework that explicitly allows for non-rational behavior. We do not place any restrictions on how players can deviate from rational behavior. Instead we assume that there exists a lower bound p E [0,1] such that all players play and are believed to play rationally with...

Economic predictions are highly sensitive to model and informational specifications. Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) show that, in static games with incomplete information, only very weak predictions, namely, the interim correlated rationalizable (ICR) actions, are robust to higher-order belief...

In a financial contracting model, we study the optimal debt structure to resolve financial distress. We show that a debt structure where two distinct debt classes co-exist - one class fully concentrated and with control rights upon default, the other dispersed and without control rights -...

We consider borrowers with the opportunity to raise funds from a competitive baking sector, that shares information about borrowers, and an alternative hidden lender. We highlight that the presence of the hidden lender restricts the contracts that can be obtained from the banking sector and that...