Can vanity do any good? It may seem obvious to answer this question in the negative, as economists have shown how reputational concerns lead agents e.g. to ignore valuable information, to herd, and to become overly risk averse. We explore how proud agents may be a social blessing. An agent may...

This discussion paper resulted in an article in the 'Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization' (2007). Volume 62, pages 579-590.<P> When hiring an adviser (he), a policy maker (she) often faces the problem that she has incomplete information about his preferences. Some advisers are good, in...</p>

In models of sequential decision making herd behaviour occurs if the signals smart(dumb) agents receive are (un)correlated and if agents have reputational concerns. We show thatintroducing costly effort to become informed about project payoffs (i) eliminates herdbehaviour and (ii) shifts...

We analyze the reporting strategies of firms and the investigation strategies of auditors in an archetype principles-based financial reporting system. To this end, we add a verification stage to a standard cheap-talk game, and apply the resulting game to financial reporting. We show that for a...

We test the Average Credible Deviation Criterion (ACDC), a stability measure and refinement for cheap talk equilibria introduced in De Groot Ruiz, Offerman & Onderstal (2011b). ACDC has been shown to be predictive under general conditions and to organize data well in previous experiments meant...

Currently no refinement exists that successfully selects equilibria across a wider range of Cheap Talk games. We propose a generalization of refinements based on credible deviations, such as neologism proofness and announcement proofness. According to our Average Credible Deviation Criterion...

This discussion paper resulted in a publication in the <A href="http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jems.12037/abstract">Journal of Economics & Management Strategy</A>. Organization differ in the degree to which they differentiate employees by ability. We analyse how the effect of differentiation on employee morale may explain this variation. By comparing...</a>