The goal of this paper is to introduce communication in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on decision panels that are comprised of agents sharing a common goal and having a joint task. Members of the panel decide whether to acquire costly information or...

Psychological experiments demonstrate that people exhibit a taste for consistency. Individuals are inclined to interpret new evidence in ways that confirm their pre-existing beliefs. They also tend to change their beliefs to enhance the desirability of their past actions. I present a model that...

The goal of this paper is to illustrate the significance of information acquisition in mechanism design. We provide a stark example of a mechanism design problem in a collective choice environment with information acquisition. We concentrate on committees that are comprised of agents sharing a...

A large body of experimental data demonstrates that people's beliefs influence their well-being beyond the indirect effect through the actions taken. I present a model that incorporates beliefs into an agent's utility function. The paper provides axiomatic foundations for a special class of...

We consider preference relations over information that are monotone: more information is preferred to less. We prove that, if a preference relation on information about an uncountable set of states of nature is monotone, then it is not representable by a utility function.

We comment on the relation between models of information based on signals/partitions, and those based on sigma-algebras. We show that more informative signals need not generate finer sigma-algebras, hence that Blackwell's theorem fails if information is modeled as sigma-algebras. The reason is...