Some behaviors, ideas or technologies spread and become persistent in society, whereas others vanish. This paper analyzes the role of social influence in determining such distinct collective outcomes. Agents are assumed to acquire information from others through a certain sampling process, that...

The theoretical literature on the cumulative innovation process has emphasized the role of ex-ante licensing – namely, licensing agreements negotiated before the follow-on innovator has sunk its R&D investment – in mitigating the risk of hold-up of future innovations. In this paper, we...

A decision maker (DM) considers the acquisition of a multi-attribute object with uncertain qualities which can be discovered at a cost. DM's problem is to decide how much to invest in the discovery and whether to adopt or discard based on partial information. We characterize the solution in some...

We show that in multi-sender communication games where senders imperfectly observe the state, if the state space is large enough, then there can exist equilibria arbitrarily close to full revelation of the state as the noise in the senders' observations gets small. In the case of replacement...

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...

In this paper we study market environments where information is costly to acquire and is also useful to potential competitors. Agents may sell, or buy, reports over the information acquired and choose their trades in the market on the basis of what they learnt. Reports are unverifiable – cheap...

We study how the predictive power of level-k models changes as we perturb the classical beauty contest setting along two dimensions: the strength of the coordination motive and the information symmetry. We use a variation of the Morris and Shin (2002) model as the unified framework for our...

This paper develops a model of bargaining over decision rights between an uninformed principal and an informed but self-interested agent. We introduce two different bargaining mechanisms: tacit and explicit bargaining. In tacit bargaining, an uninformed principal makes a take-it-or-leave-it...

We introduce a framework for modeling pairwise interactive beliefs and provide an epistemic foundation for Nash equilibrium in terms of pairwise epistemic conditions locally imposed on only some pairs of players. Our main result considerably weakens not only the standard sufficient conditions by...