From the regulation of sports to lawmaking in parliament, in many situations one group of people (“agents”) make decisions that affect the payoffs of others (“principals”) who may offer action-contingent transfers in order to sway the agents' decisions. Prat and Rustichini (2003)...

Expert advice is often biased in ways that benefit the advisor. We demonstrate how self-deception helps advisors be biased while preserving their self-image as ethical and identify limits to advisors' ability to self-deceive. In experiments where advisors recommend one of two investments to a...

Rule learning posits that decision makers, rather than choosing over actions, choose over behavioral rules with different levels of sophistication. Rules are reinforced over time based on their historically observed payoffs in a given game. Past works on rule learning have shown that when...

In the presence of self-interested parties, mechanism designers typically aim to implement some social-choice function in an equilibrium. This paper studies the cost of such equilibrium requirements in terms of communication. While a certain amount of information x needs to be communicated just...

A growing literature analyzes revenue-maximizing contracts for situations in which agents can acquire private information before they decide whether to join the contract. It is conjectured that the results also apply to the more natural scenario where information can be acquired either before or...

We study auctions under restricted communication. Agents have valuations distributed over an interval but can only report one of a finite number of messages. We provide necessary conditions for welfare as well as revenue maximizing auctions in the independent private values case when bidders...

We consider an oligopolistic market where firms compete in price and quality and where consumers have heterogeneous information: some consumers know both the prices, and quality of the products offered, some know only the prices, and some know neither. We show that if there are sufficiently many...

We build on research from neurobiology to model the process through which the brain maps outside evidence into decisions. The sensory system encodes information through cell-firing. Cell-firing is measured against a threshold, and an action is triggered depending on whether the threshold is...

Recent field evidence suggests a positive link between overconfidence and innovative activities. In this paper we argue that the connection between overconfidence and innovation is more complex than the previous literature suggests. In particular, we show theoretically and experimentally that...

We study first- and second-order subjective expectations (beliefs) in strategic decision-making. We elicit probabilistically both first- and second-order beliefs and apply the method to a Hide-and-Seek experiment. We study the relationship between choice and beliefs in terms of whether observed...