We study the ability of multi-group teams to undertake binary projects in a decentralized environment. The equilibrium outcomes of our model display familiar features in collaborative settings, including inefficient gradualism, inaction, and contribution cycles, wherein groups alternate taking...

This is a paper in the ``economists ruin everything'' field. It considers whether Catch-22 situations can persist as an equilibrium phenomenon. Rather than being an arbitrary rule or a set of self-serving beliefs, the focus is on the preferences of Gatekeepers who choose to create such...

In the context of collecting property taxes from 13432 households in a district of Lima (Peru), we investigate whether prioritized enforcement can improve the effective use of limited enforcement capacity. We randomly assign households to two treatment arms: one replicating the city's usual...

Two potentially asymmetric players compete for a prize of common value, which is initially unknown, by exerting efforts. A designer has two instruments for contest design. First, she decides whether and how to disclose an informative signal of the prize value to players. Second, she sets the...

We study a standard collective action problem in which successful achievement of a group interest requires costly participation by some fraction of its members. How should we model the internal organization of these groups when there is asymmetric information about the preferences of their...

We study how beliefs about firm value respond to public information stemming from either public announcements or shareholder meetings. We focus on settings with homogeneous shareholders (i.e., agents with common preferences and opinions), where information is about which course of action is best...

How does lie detection constrain the potential for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a model of Bayesian persuasion in which the Receiver can detect lies with positive probability. We show that the Sender lies more when the lie detection probability increases. As...

Crisis bargaining games are widely used to analyze bilateral conflicts, featuring strategic bluffing akin to poker. Players risk substantial losses from overplaying their hand but can secure significant gains if their opponent concedes. Since decisions in crises typically emerge from collective...