We consider a bandit problem faced by a team of two heterogeneous players. The team is hierarchical in that one (the principal) retains the exclusive right to terminate the project while the other (the agent) focuses strictly on implementing the project assigned to him. As a key departure, we...

While political correctness is a dominant norm in many public situations, we also observe behaviors that are apparently "politically incorrect", often from professionals and experts. This paper examines the flip side of political correctness as analyzed in Morris (2001) to shed some light on the...

We consider a "tenure-clock problem" in which a principal may set a deadline by which she needs to evaluate an agent's ability and decides whether to promote him or not. We embed this problem in a continuous-time model with both hidden action and hidden information, where the principal must...

A group of individuals, with a potential conflict of interest, face a choice among alternatives. There is a network externality such that the chosen alternative yields value only if sufficiently many individuals get on board. Their preferences for each alternative and the benefit derived from a...

The class of double-crossing preferences, where signaling is cheaper for higher types than for lower types at low signaling levels and the opposite is true at high signaling levels, underlines the phenomenon of countersignaling. We show that under the D1 refinement, the equilibrium signaling...

Auctions are a popular and prevalent form of trading mechanism, despite the restriction that the seller cannot price-discriminate among potential buyers. To understand why this is the case, we consider an auction-like environment in which a seller with an indivisible object negotiates with two...

Timing of market entry is one of the most important strategic decisions a firm must make, but its decision process becomes convoluted with information and payoff spillovers. The threat of competition pushes firms to enter earlier to preempt their rivals while the possibility of learning make...

This paper provides a general analysis of signaling under doublecrossing preferences with a continuum of types. There are natural economic environments where indifference curves of two types cross twice, so that the celebrated single-crossing property fails to hold. Equilibrium exhibits a...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic signaling model of an R&D market in which a researcher can choose either a safe project (exploitation) or a risky project (exploration) at each instance. We argue that there are substantial efficiency gains from rewarding minor innovations above their social...

We develop a general model, with the exponential bandit as a special case, in which high-ability agents are more likely to achieve early success but also learn faster that their project is not promising. These counteracting effects give rise to a signaling model in which the single-crossing...