We argue that the intensity of competition within a group or organization can have an important influence on whether or not people cheat. To make this point we first work through a simple model of strategic misreporting in the workplace. For low and high levels of competition we show that, in...

In an experiment, a group of strangers was randomly divided in pairs to play a prisoners’ dilemma; this process was indefinitely repeated. Cooperation did not increase when subjects could send public messages amounting to binding promises of future play.

We consider a cheap talk model with the sender’s exit option. We show that in the case of discrete action space, it can be the case that there exists an informative equilibrium if and only if the sender’s bias is sufficiently small or sufficiently large. The latter case is sharply...

I find in two classes of sender–receiver games that the receiver’s equilibrium payoff is not increasing in the informativeness of a public signal because the sender may transmit less information when the public signal is more informative.

We model strategic mediation of the communication between an informed expert with a discrete type space and an uninformed decision maker. A strategic mediator can improve communication even when he is biased into the same direction as the expert.

Shotgun clauses are commonly included in the business agreements of partnerships and limited liability companies (LLCs), but the role of offeror typically remains unassigned. In a common-value, one-sided asymmetric information setting, unequal and inefficient outcomes occur with an unassigned...

Using the experimental sessions of Goeree and Holt (2005), we show that step thinking fits the long-run outcome of minimum-effort and median-effort games surprisingly well for all values of the cost parameter. In the latter, the predicted discontinuous behaviour of step thinking accommodates the...

In a one-shot Prisoners’ dilemma experiment, female participants are highly sensitive to the social frame. Male participants are not.

Experimental studies have compared cooperation across different nonmarket social dilemma settings, but the experimental literature has largely overlooked comparing cooperation across market and nonmarket settings. This paper reports the results from an experiment that compares behavior in...