Analysts make competing claims about when and how politicians can use fear to gain support for suboptimal policies. Using a model, we clarify how common attributes of fear affect politicians’ abilities to achieve self-serving outcomes that are bad for voters. In it, a politician provides...

In this paper, we use experimental data to study players' stability in normal-form games where subjects have to report beliefs and to choose actions. Subjects saw each of 12 games four times in a regular or isomorphic form spread over two days without feedback. We document a high degree of...

This thesis advances game theory by formally analysing the implications of replacing some of its most stringent assumptions with alternatives that –at least in certain contexts– have received greater empirical support. Specifically, this thesis makes two distinct contributions in the field...

We examine subjects’ behavior in sender-receiver games where there are gains from trade and alignment of interests in one of the two states. We elicit subjects’ beliefs, risk and other-regarding preferences. Our design also allows us to examine the behavior of subjects in both roles, to...

We model an interaction between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver. As in the classic cheap talk setup, the informed player sends a message to an uninformed receiver who is to take an action which affects the payoffs of both players. However, in our model the sender can communicate...

The aim of this paper is to interpret the relationships between information networks and the armed conflict in Colombia. Over a period of paramilitary violence networks of informants were used with a strategic purpose. In fact, the paramilitaries were preparing each slaughter counting...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

We propose two characteristics of players' beliefs and study their role in shaping the set of rationalizable strategy profiles in games with incomplete information. The first characteristic, type-sensitivity, is related to how informative a player thinks his type is. The second characteristic,...

In an information transmission situation, a sender's concern for its credibility could endow itself with an invisible power to control the receiver's decisions so that the sender can manipulate information without being detected. In this case, the sender can achieve its favored outcome without...

Sentiments are characteristics of players' beliefs. I propose two notions of sentiments, confidence and optimism, and I study their role in shaping the set of rationalizable strategy profiles in (incomplete information) games with complementarities. Confidence is related to a player's perceived...