Incentivicing doctors to take the costs of treatment into account in their prescription decision could lead to lower health care expenditures and higher welfare. This paper shows that also the opposite effects can result. The reason is a misalignment of doctor and patient incentives: Because of...

Networks can have an important effect on economic outcomes. Given the complexity of many of these networks, agents will generally not know their structure. We study the sensitivity of game-theoretic predictions to the specification of players’ (common) prior on the network in a setting where...

Nowadays many employers offer their employees the possibility of an insurance against too large losses in income when retiring or becoming disabled. This paper models the optimization problem of the employer when setting up such a so-called pension fund. not surprisingly, it turns out that the...

Networks can have an important effect on economic outcomes. Given the complexity of many of these networks, agents will generally not know their structure. We study the sensitivity of game-theoretical predictions to the specification of players’ (common) prior on the network in a setting where...

Standard game-theoretic solution concepts do not guarantee meaningful commu- nication in cheap-talk games. In this paper, we define a solution concept which guarantees communication for a large class of games by designing a behavior pro- tocol which the receiver uses to judge messages sent by...

The value of information has been the subject of many studies in a strategic context.The central question in these studies is how valuable the information hidden in the chance moves of a game is for one or more of the players.Generally speaking, only the extra possibilities that are beneficial...

We analyze the Spence education game in experimental markets.We compare a signaling and a screening variant, and we analyze the e®ect of increasing the number of employers from two to three.In all treatments, there is a strong tendency to separate.More efficient workers invest more often and...

This note studies a version of the Stackelberg model in which the Leader has more information about demand than the Follower. We show that there exists a unique D1 equilibrium and that this equilibrium is perfectly revealing. We also give a full characterization of the equilibrium in terms of...

We compare communication about private information to communication about actions in a one- shot 2-person public good game with private information. The informed player, who knows the exact return from contributing and whose contribution is unobserved, can send a message about the return or her...

We compare signaling by words and actions in a one-shot 2-person public good game with private information. The informed player, who knows the exact return from contributing, can signal by contributing first (actions) or by sending a costless message (words). Words can be about the return or...