This experiment explores whether individuals know that other people are biased. We confirm that overestimation of abilities is a pervasive problem, but observe that most people are not aware of it, i.e. they think others are unbiased. We investigate several explanations for this result. As a...

everal empirical findings have challenged the traditional trade-off between risk and incentives. By combining risk aversion and limited liability in a standard principal-agent model the empirical puzzle on the positive relationship between risk and incentives can be explained.

I consider a situation, where the agent can acquire payoff-relevant information either before or after the contract is signed. To raise efficiency, the principal might solicit information; to retain all surplus, however, she must prevent precontractual information gathering. The following class...

This paper analyzes truthtelling incentives in pre-vote communication in heterogeneous committees. We generalize the classical Condorcet jury model by introducing a new informational structure that captures consistency of information. In contrast to the impossibility result shown by Coughlan...

We formulate a dynamic learning-and-adjustment model of a market in which sellers choose signals that potentially reveal their types. If the dynamic process selects a unique limiting outcome, then that outcome must be an undefeated equilibrium; though to be undefeated does not suffice to be the...

This paper analyzes optimal incentive contracts for information acquisition and revelation. A decision maker faces the problem to design a contract that provides an expert with incentives to acquire and reveal information. We show that it is in general not optimal to reward the expert if his...

A network payoff function assigns a utility to all participants in a (social) network. In this paper we discuss properties of such network payoff functions that guarantee the existence of certain types of pairwise stable networks and the convergence of certain network formation processes. In...

Ostrovsky [10] develops a theory of stability for a model of matching in exogenously given networks. For this model a generalization of pairwise stability, chain stability, can always be satisfied as long as agents’ preferences satisfy same side substitutability and cross side complementarity....

We provide an evolutionary foundation to evidence that in some situations humans maintain optimistic or pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty and are ignorant to relevant aspects of the environment. Players in strategic games face Knightian uncertainty about opponents' actions and maximize...

Hotelling’s famous ‘Principle of Minimum Differentiation’ asserts that two firms engaging in spatial competition with fixed prices will decide to locate at the same place. Interpreting spatial competition as modeling product differentiation, firms will thus offer products that are not...