We study social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model, emphasizing the trade-off between marginal innovation (combining existing technologies) and radical innovation (breaking new ground). We characterize both short-term and long-term dynamics of innovation, and the...

How does renegotiation affect contracts between a principal and an agent subject to persistent private information and moral hazard? This paper introduces a concept of renegotiation-proofness, which adapts to stochastic games the concepts of weak renegotiation-proofness and internal consistency...

Cooperative concepts of renegotiation in repeated games have typically assumed that Pareto-ranked equilibria could not coexist within the same renegotiation-proof set. With explicit renegotiation, however, a proposal to move to a Pareto-superior equilibrium can be deterred by a different...

Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, employees with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...

We consider collective decisions made by agents whose preferences and power depend on past events and decisions. Faced with an ineffcient equilibrium and an opportunity to commit to a policy, can the agents reach an agreement on such a policy? Under an intuitive condition linking power...

How do successive, forward-looking agents experiment with interdependent and endogenous technologies? In this paper, trying a radically new technology not only is informative of the value of similar technologies, but also reduces the cost of experimenting with them, in effect expanding the space...

What does contract negotiation look like when some parties hold private information and negotiation frictions are negligible? This paper analyzes the above question and provides a foundation for renegotiation-proof contracts in a related environment. The model extends the framework of the Coase...

We propose adding a third,intermediate,verdict to the two-verdict used in criminal trials. We show that the additional verdict can be used to distinguish between convicted defendants, based on the residual doubt regarding their guilt at the end of the trial, in a way that improves welfare and...

Given two sets of random variables, how can one determine whether the former variables are more interdependent than the latter? This question is of major importance to economists, for example, in comparing how various policies affect systemic risk or income inequality. Moreover, correlation is...

Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...