The paper provides a speci?cation of belief systems for models of large economies with anonymity in which aggregate states depend only on cross-section distributions of types. For belief systems satisfying certain conditions of mutual absolute continuity, the paper gives a necessary and...

The title of this chapter is deliberately provocative. Intuitively, many will be inclined to see conscious control of mental process as a good thing. Yet control comes at a high price. The consciously not directly controlled, automatic, parallel processing of information is not only much faster,...

We modify the principal-agent model with moral hazard by assuming that the agent is expectation-based loss averse according to Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The optimal contract is a binary payment scheme even for a rich performance measure, where standard preferences predict a fully...

By using general information structures and precision criteria based on the dispersion of conditional expectations, we study how oligopolists’ information acquisition decisions may change the effects of information sharing on the consumer surplus. Sharing information about individual cost...

We consider a principal-agent model with moral hazard where the agent’s knowledge about the performance measure is ambiguous and he is averse towards ambiguity. We show that the principal may optimally provide no incentives or contract only on a subset of all informative performance measures....

We study a dynamic model of team production with moral hazard. We show that the players begin to invest effort only shortly before the time limit when the reward for solving the task is shared equally. We explore how the team can design contracts to mitigate this form of procrastination and show...

Neeman (2004) and Heifetz and Neeman (2006) have shown that, in auctions with incomplete information about payoffs, full surplus extraction is only possible if agents’ beliefs about other agents are fully informative about their own payoff parameters. They argue that the set of...

This paper studies the social value of public information in environments without common knowledge of the data-generating process. We show that the stronger the coordination motive behind agents’ behaviour is, the more they use private or public signals in the way that they suspect others are...

Mechanism design theory strongly relies on the concept of Nash equilibrium. However, studies of experimental games show that Nash equilibria are rarely played and that subjects may be thinking only a finite number of iterations. We study one of the most influential benchmarks of mechanism design...

This paper studies collusion in one-shot auctions, where a buyer can bribe his competitors into lowering their bids. We modify the single-unit Vickrey auction to incite deviations from the designated-winner scenario and thus undermine collusion. The construction of mechanism does not require the...