We develop a framework in which: (i) a firm can have a new product tested publicly before launch; and (ii) tests vary in toughness, holding expertise fixed.  Price flexibility boosts the strong positive impact on consumer beliefs of passing a tough test and mitigates the strong negative impact...

Herding arises when an agents private information is swamped by public information in what Jackson and Kalai (1997) call a recurring game. The agent will fail to reveal his own information and will follow the actions of his predecessor and, as a result, useful information is lost, which might...

This paper examines experimental evidence relating to herd behaviour in situations when subjects can learn from each other, and can delay their decision. Subjects acted rationally, gaining from observational learning, despite penalties for delay. Cascades were ubiquitous and reverse-cascades...

The increasing number of antitrust cases that affect more than one country calls for more active cooperation between competition authorities.  I analyse the impact of exchange of confidential information between two authorities deciding on a multinational merger.  The authorities want to clear...

This paper presents a pairwise matching model with two-sided information asymmetry to analyse the impact of information costs on endogenous network building and matching by information intermedairies. The framework innovates by examining the role of information costs on incentives for trade...

A two-sided, pair-wise matching model is developed to analyse the strategic interaction between two information intermediaries who compete in commission rates and network size, giving rise to a fragmented duopoly market structure. The model suggests that network competition between information...

The epistemic program in game theory uses formal models of interactive reasoning to provide foundations for various game-theoretic solution concepts. Much of this work is based around the (static) Aumann structure model of interactive epistemology, but more recently dynamic models of interactive...

This paper offers a simple but rich framework to study communication subject to various constraints such as anonymity requirements, equal treatment of multiple agents, overconfidence of an expert, and garbling, by extending the cheap talk model of Crawford and Sobel (1982). Common to these...

We present a model in which a principal delegates the choice of project to an agent with different preferences. A project`s characteristics are verifiable once presented to the principal, but the principal does not know how many projects are available to the agent. The principal chooses the set...

Negotiations often take long a time even if a delay in the agreement is inefficient. One typical explanation is the existence of private information of at least one party; the time is then a discriminating instrument. The paper starts by pointing out that this result does not hold once the...