Decisions about intervention can be understood as decisions about tolerance, because an act of tolerance is an act of nonintervention, and, conversely, an act of intervention can be understood as an act of intolerance. But acts of tolerance, typically made under conditions of epistemic...

We present a game-theoretic model of political discourse that explores how strategic incentives to make potentially persuasive arguments vary across different informational contexts. We show that political sophistication of the listeners fundamentally affects the speakers' incentives to make...

We consider a principal-multiagent framework with adverse selection when contracting is possible ex ante. However, enforcement of contracts is imperfect, which results in inefficiencies. We study how group contracting may or may not mitigate those inefficiencies.

I examine the case where fulfillment of a contractual commitment is only imperfectly verifiable and ask whether the court should then tell the truth regarding the action in dispute. I show that truth seeking does not maximize the expected surplus from contractual relationships. From the parties'...

This paper studies the constrained efficient intergovernmental transfer contract between the central government and the states in a federal economy. We consider an environment with moral hazard, incomplete enforceability, and date-0 negotiation costs. The interaction of moral hazard and...

An agent who is near-rational in the sense of Akerlof and Yellen makes a slight mistake which has only a first-order effect ohnhis own utility. If he is constrained by a participation constraint on another party, as in a principal-agent relationship, the result only holds when the agent is...

We examine the importance of agents' private information about their accident proneness and action, when the principal delegates via an optimal auction the undertaking of a risky activity to an agent. A unique feature of our model is that the risk-neutral principal can provide, at no cost,...

In this paper signals are observed by two receivers who have different preferences about the sender and therefore respond to information about himin different ways. This can result in a Catch-22 for the sender; if he sends a signal to induce a positive response from one receiver, this may induce...

This paper analyzes the efficient use of information in an agency relationship with moral hazard, when parties are risk-neutral. We show that, given an arbitrary information system, all relevant information from a mechanism-design point of view can be summarized by a binary statistic. We then...

The information created and disseminated through the litigation process can have social value. Suppose a long-lived plaintiff is suing a defendant for damages sustained in an accident. The plaintiff may suffer similar damages in future accidents involving different defendants. Potential injurers...