We study a rank-order tournament in which employees acquire and use private information for an investment decision. In this environment, competition can turn employees into yes men who make investment decisions that excessively agree with preconceived notions. The specter of yes-man behavior may...

With ideological parties being better informed about the state of the world than voters, the true motivation of policy proposals is hard to judge for the electorate. However, if reform proposals have to be agreed upon by government members with heterogeneous policy preferences, it may become...

In markets for credence goods, such as doctor visits, customers sample a firm for a few periods, before deciding whether to retain or fire that firm. In our model, customers have endogenously determined patience in tolerating bad outcomes from credence-good providers. The more competitive the...

Physicians choose capacity before demand materializes; actual demand may be higher or lower than capacity. If a physician's capacity exceeds demand, she may have an incentive to overtreat, i.e., she may provide unnecessary treatments to use up idle capacity. By contrast, with excess demand she...

We analyse a cheap-talk game where contrasting lobbies are asymmetrically informed. Equilibrium information transmission depends on each lobby's preference alignment with the legislator on the dimension of its expertise, and on the conflict of lobby interests. Full revelation is possible only...

We analyze the role of liability, insurance, and side payments for independent safety controls with unobservable care levels. By independent safety controls we mean that the accident probability depends on the care levels of two parties, and that the effects of the controls on the accident...

We consider the design of contracts in a principal-agent setting with two agents where each agent privately observes and reports to the principal a signal regarding the actions taken. We consider two cases: one where the agents observe the same signal and one where the agents observe different...

Most food products can be classified as credence goods, and regulations exist to provide consumers with a substitute for the lacking information and trust. Rather than having no regulation in place, producers of high-quality goods are better off when a compromise is reached that leads to an...

The existing literature postulates that in nuisance suits courts should balance, for a property right under conflict, several values of the litigating parties. This practice, however, is controversial, mainly due to courts´ resource scarcity. This paper suggests an alternative institutional...

In a signalling model of conformity, we demonstrate that naïve observers, those that take actions at face value, constrain the set of actions that can possibly be social norms. With rational observers many actions can be norms, but with naïve observers only actions close to that preferred by...