The rational expectations equilibrium (REE), as introduced in Radner (1979) in a general equilibrium setting à la Arrow–Debreu–McKenzie, often fails to have desirable properties such as universal existence, incentive compatibility and efficiency. We resolve those problems by providing a new...

We study the question of which social choice functions from an abstract type space to a set of outcomes are truthful, i.e., implementable by truthful mechanisms, when utilities are quasi-linear. For convex domains, our main theorem characterizes truthful social choice functions as those...

The set of all Bayesian–Nash equilibrium payoffs that the players can achieve by making conditional commitments at the interim stage of a Bayesian game coincides with the set of all feasible, incentive compatible and interim individually rational payoffs of the Bayesian game. Furthermore, the...

Cheating such as corruption and tax evasion is prevalent in the developing world; therefore, many interventions have been undertaken to reduce cheating in developing countries. Although some field evidence shows that poverty is correlated with cheating, the causal effect of poverty on cheating in...

We show that in markets with asymmetric information, even if there is full agreement on the choice of optimal information quality, entrusting the choice of (unverifiable) public information quality to traders who benefit from such information leads to inefficiencies. However, delegation of...

We consider the optimality of liquidated damages contracts in a setting of contractual ambiguity and potential for disputes. We show that when parties are ambiguity averse enough, they will optimally choose liquidated damages contracts and sacrifice risk sharing opportunities.

In this laboratory experiment we study the use of strategic ignorance to delegate real authority within a firm. A worker can gather information on investment projects, while a manager makes the implementation decision. The manager can monitor the worker. This allows her to exploit any...

I consider first-price auctions (FPA) and second-price auctions (SPA) with two asymmetric bidders. The FPA is known to be more profitable than the SPA if the strong bidder's distribution function is convex and the weak bidder's distribution is obtained by truncating or horizontally shifting the...

This paper studies a two-dimensional cheap talk game with two senders and one receiver. The senders possess the same information and sequentially send messages about that information. In one-dimensional sequential message cheap talk games where the state space is unbounded, the information is...