Economic agents care about their relative well-being, and the comparisons are usually local. We capture this using a network model, in which an agent's payoff depends on the ranking of their allocation among their network neighbors’. Given a network, an allocation is called α-stable if no...

Prominent research argues that consumers often use personal budgets to manage self-control problems. This paper analyzes the link between budgeting and self-control problems in consumption-saving decisions. It shows that the use of good-specific budgets depends on the combination of a demand for...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision....

I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has many applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of the commons. I show that information about other players'...

We present an electoral theory on the public provision of local public goods to an imperfectly informed electorate. We show that electoral incentives lead to greater spending if the electorate is not well informed. A more informed electorate induces candidates to target funds only to specific...

We study a multi-dimensional collective decision under incomplete information. Agents have Euclidean preferences and vote by simple majority on each issue (dimension), yielding the coordinate-wise median. Judicious rotations of the orthogonal axes -- the issues that are voted upon -- lead to...

In winner-take-all tournaments, agents' performance is determined jointly by effort and luck, and the top performer is rewarded. We study the impact of the ''shape of luck'' -- the details of the distribution of performance shocks -- on incentives in such settings. We are concerned with the...

The modern Condorcet jury theorem states that under weak conditions, when voters have common interests, elections will aggregate information when the population is large, in any equilibrium. Here, we study the performance of large elections with population uncertainty. We find that the modern...

We analyze a three-player legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive decision. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological intensities, i.e., the weight placed on the ideological decision relative to the weight placed on the distributive decision....

We propose and axiomatically characterize dynamically consistent update rules for decision making under ambiguity. These rules apply to the preferences with multiple priors of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989), and are the first, for any model of preferences over acts, to be able to reconcile typical...