Kinship ties are a common institution that may facilitate in-group coordination and cooperation. Yet their benefits - or lack thereof - depend crucially on the broader institutional environment. We study how the prevalence of clan ties affect how communities confronted two well-studied...

Political leaders make policy choices which are often hard to explain via institutions. We use the behavior of Colombian paramilitary groups as an environment to study non-institutional sources of variation in how public good provision and violence are combined to control populations. We...

We conducted a field experiment in a 401(k) plan to measure the effect of disseminating information about peer behavior on savings. Low-saving employees received simplified plan enrollment or contribution increase forms. A randomized subset of forms stated the fraction of age-matched coworkers...

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no...

We develop a framework of group corruption via back-door negotiations between an outside initiator and an authority of decision-makers in a hierarchical organization. We examine the role played by the architecture of a multi-tier authority and determine under such a structure how bargaining...

Collective decision making requires preference aggregation even if no ideal aggregation method exists (Arrow, 1950). We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members' ordinal preferences--that is, how they interpret "the will of the people." Our experiment elicits revealed...

We consider dynamic processes of coalition formation in which a principal bargains sequentially with a group of agents. This problem is at the core of a variety of applications in economics and politics, including a lobbyist seeking to pass a bill, an entrepreneur setting up a start-up, or a...

Many committees--juries, political task forces, etc.--spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting rules...

We develop a dynamic model of board decision-making. We show that a board could retain a policy all directors agree is worse than an available alternative. Thus, directors may retain a CEO they agree is bad--a deadlocked board leads to an entrenched CEO. We explore how to compose boards and...

I develop a model of (individually rational) collective reality denial in groups, organizations and markets. Whether participants' tendencies toward wishful thinking reinforce or dampen each other is shown to hinge on a simple and novel mechanism. When an agent can expect to benefit from other's...