This paper formalizes a widely discussed peer effect entitled 'acting white'. 'Acting White' is modeled as a two audience signaling quandary: signals that induce highe wages can be signals that induce peer group rejection. Without peer effects, the equilibrium involve all ability types choosing...

In this paper, we consider relationships between the collective preference and the non-cooperative game-theoretic approaches to positive political theory. In particular, we show that an apparently decisive difference between the two approaches - that in sufficiently complex environments (e.g....

We augment the standard Crawford-Sobel (Econometrica 1982) model of cheap talk communication by allowing the informed party to use both costless and costly messages. The issues on which we focus are the consequences for cheap talk signaling of the option to use a costly signal ("burned money");...

McKelvey [4] proved that for strong simple preference aggregation rules applied to multidimensional sets of alternatives, the typical situation is that either the core is nonempty or the top-cycle set includes all available alternatives. But the requirement that the rule be strong excludes,...

Most of the theoretical work on purely redistributive taxation has presumed a two-party model in which the parties choose (affine) tax policies to attract a majority of voters. However, while majoritarian decision rules are the norm in legislatures, relatively few democratic electoral systems...