Consider an agent (manager,artist, etc.) who has imperfect private information about his productivity. At the beginning of his career (period 1, “short run”), the agent chooses among publicly observable actions that generate imperfect signals of his productivity. The actions can be ranked...

Monderer and samet (1989) generalize Aumann's (1976) agreeing to disagree result for the case of beliefs. They show that if the posteriors of an event are "common p-blief" then they cannot differ by more than 2(1-p). We provide a different proof of this result with a lower bound of 1-p. An...

This paper shows that if rationality is not common knowledge, the no-trade theorem of Milgrom and Stokey (1982) fails to hold. We adopt Monderer and Samet's (1990) notion of common p-belief and show that when traders entertain doubts about the rationality of other traders, and even if these...

The Coase theorem states that in public good problems, when there are no transaction costs, once property rights are well defined, the efficient outcome will always result. In particular, the assignment of property rights has, by itself, no efficiency implications; different allocations of...

One of the approaches in consumer theory considers each product as a collection of attributes. As opposed to the traditional approach, according to which consumer preferences for products are the underlying features of economic modeling, they are now derived from the composition and strength of...

Many have observed that political candidates running for election are often purposefully expressing themselves in vague and ambiguous terms. Moreover, the candidates' ambiguity typically involves precisely those issues which stand in the center of public debate. In this paper, we provide a...