We study markets for sensitive personal information. An agent wants to communicate with another party but any revealed information can be intercepted and sold to a third party whose reaction harms the agent. The market for information induces an adverse sorting effect, allocating the information...

We provide an explanation for why committees may behave over-cautiously. A committee of experts makes a decision on a proposed innovation on behalf of 'society'. Each expert's signal about the innovation's quality is generated by the available evidence and the best practices of the experts'...

In many economic contexts, an elusive variable of interest is the agent's belief about relevant events, e.g. about other agents' behavior. A growing number of surveys and experiments ask participants to state beliefs explicitly but little is known about the causal relation between beliefs and...

This paper shows that agent inattention to taxes generates a time-inconsistency problem in the choice of tax policy. In equilibrium, inattention leads to inefficiently high tax rates and a taxation bias emerges. Combining structural and sufficient statistics approaches, we quantify the magnitude...

Existing theoretical and experimental studies have established that unanimity is a poor decision rule for promoting information aggregation. Despite this, unanimity is frequently used in committees making decisions on behalf of society. This paper shows that when committee members are exposed to...

Informal exchange of information among competitors has been well-documented in a variety of industries, and one's expectation of reciprocity shown to be a key determinant. We use an indeterminate horizon centipede game to establish a feedback loop in the laboratory and show that an individual's...

We study an organization with a top management (principal) and multiple subunits (agents) with private information that determine the organization's aggregate efficiency. Under centralization, eliciting the agents' private information may induce the principal to manipulate aggregate information,...

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...