There has been an explosion of new forms of communications media for interpersonal communication. There is anecdotal evidence of people suffering from 'information overload' as a result of these developments. This paper presents the results from, and analysis of, a case study of a perceived...

I study the consequences of heterogeneity of skills for the design of an optimal unemployment insurance, using a principal-agent set-up with a risk neutral insurer and infinitely lived risk averse agents. Agents, who are characterised by different productivities or skills, are employed by firms...

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....

In sender--receiver games high--quality types can distinguish themselves from low--quality types by sending a costly signal. Allowing for additional, noisy information on sender types can radically alter sender behavior in such games. We examine equilibria where medium types separate themselves...

It is shown here that market crashes and bubbles can arise without external shocks. Sudden changes in behavior coming after a long period of stationarity may be the result of endogenous information processing. Except for the daily observation of the market, there is no new information, no...

We study a strategic model of dynamic trading where agents are asymmetrically informed over common value sources of uncertainty. There is a continuum of uninformed buyers and a finite number of sellers, some of them informed. When there is only one seller, full information revelation never...

In the paper we analyze how the possibility of revealing information to a competitor alters the entry/investment behavior of a first entrant. We show that once it has entered the market, the firm might refrain from making further profitable investments in order to hide information from the...

This paper develops a model of pricing and advertising in a matching environment with capacity constrained sellers. Sellers' expenditure on directly informative advertising attracts consumers only probabilistically. Consumers who happen to observe advertisements randomize over the advertised...

We examine whether a simple agent--based model can generate asset price bubbles and crashes of the type observed in a series of laboratory asset market experiments beginning with the work of Smith, Suchanek and Williams (1988). We follow the methodology of Gode and Sunder (1993, 1997) and...

This paper documents the delayed adoption of a major technological innovation: the adoption of the diesel locomotive in the US railway industry. Contrary to other instances of major technological innovations, the delay in the adoption of the diesel locomotive was not associated with an initial...