What tariffs would countries impose if they did not have to fear any retaliation? What would occur if there was a complete breakdown of trade policy cooperation? What would be the outcome if countries engaged in fully efficient trade negotiations? And what would happen to trade policy...

Discretionary policymaking can foster strategic complementarities between private sector decisions, thus leading to multiple equilibria. This article studies a simple example, originating with Kydland and Prescott, of a government which must decide whether to build a dam to prevent adverse...

Social distancing via shelter-in-place strategies, and wearing masks, have emerged as the most effective non-pharmaceutical ways of combatting COVID-19. In the United States, choices about these policies are made by individual states. We develop a game-theoretic model and then test it...

In this paper we study how volatility in monetary policy affects economic performance in the presence of endogenously chosen information structures. To isolate the effects produced by the interaction of uncertainty in monetary policy and (possibly) asymmetric information, we consider a model in...

The foundations of incomplete contracts have been questioned using or extending the subgame perfect implementation approach of Moore and Repullo (1988). We consider the robustness of subgame perfect implementation to the introduction of small amounts of asymmetric information. We show that...

We present and experimentally test a mechanism that provides a simple, natural, low cost, and realistic solution to the problem of compliance with socially determined efficient actions, such as contributing to a public good. We note that small self-governing organizations often place enforcement...

Macroeconomic dynamics are shaped by how individual incentives to spend and accumulate interact with the decisions of others. The goal of this paper is to identify--within a simple large-game-theoretic structure--which types of agent interactions favor which types of dynamic equilibrium...

This paper reports the results of an experiment designed to assess the ability of an incumbent seller to profitably foreclose a market with exclusive contracts. We use the strategic environment described by Rasmusen, Ramseyer, and Wiley (1991) and Segal and Whinston (2000) where entry is...

This paper investigates whether judge political affiliation contributes to racial and gender disparities in sentencing using data on over 500,000 federal defendants linked to sentencing judge. Exploiting random case assignment, we find that Republican-appointed judges sentence black defendants...

Previous findings on punishment have focused on environments in which the outcomes are known with certainty. In this paper, we conduct experiments to investigate how punishment affects cooperation in a two-person stochastic prisoner's dilemma environment where each person can decide whether or...