Professional experts offer advice with the objective of appearing well informed. Their ability is evaluated on the basis of the advice given and the realized state of the world. We model this situation as a reputational cheap-talk game with continuous signal, state, and ability type spaces....

We study a model in which two perfectly informed experts offer advice to a decision maker whose actions affect the welfare of all. Experts are biased and thus may wish to pull the decision maker in different directions and to different degrees. When the decision maker consults only a single...

We conduct experiments of a cheap-talk game with incomplete information in which one sender type has an incentive to misrepresent her type. Although that Sender type mostly lies in the experiments, the Receiver tends to believe the Sender's messages. This confirms ``truth bias'' reported in...

The consequences of many policies are complicated and difficult to foresee. Those who are capable of providing information to policy makers often have a vested interest in the outcomes. This gives them an incentive to distort information to manipulate policy decisions. In this article we argue...

Two recent studies have shown that “cheap talk” is an effective means of eliminating positive hypothetical bias in experimental and field-auction settings. We further investigate the ability of cheap talk to mitigate positive hypothetical bias in a CVM phone survey administered to over 4,000...

Within a one-shot, duopoly game, we show that firms cannot use false in- store price comparisons to deter rational consumers from further beneficial price search in an effort to create market power. However, by introducing a consumer protection authority that monitors price comparisons, we...

A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...

We introduce cheap talk in a dynamic investment model with information externalities. We first show how social learning adversely affects the credibility of cheap talk messages. Next, we show how an informational cascade makes thruthtelling incentive compatible. A separating equilibrium only...

This paper analyses a model of private unemployment insurance under limited commitment and a model of public unemployment insurance subject to moral hazard in an economy with a continuum of agents and an infinite time horizon. The dynamic and steady-state properties of the private unemployment...

This paper discusses some puzzles in the contemporary macroeconomic scene in India, from the perspective of public finance and economic development. These include a fiscal deficit higher than it was during the 1991 crisis, but without a large current account deficit or rise in inflation or...