This paper studies the role of memory and communication in games between ongoing organizations. In each organization, each individual, upon entry into the game, replaces his predecessor who has the same preferences and faces the same strategic possibilities. Entry across distinct organizations...

We ask whether communication can directly substitute for memory in dynastic repeated games in which short lived individuals care about the utility of their offspring who replace them in an infinitely repeated game. Each individual is unable to observe what happens before his entry in the game....

We model dynamic mechanisms for a global commons. Countries benefit from both consumption and aggregate conservation of an open access resource. A country's relative value of consumption-to-conservation is privately observed and evolves stochastically. An optimal quota maximizes world welfare...

This paper formulates a dynamic model of global carbon consumption in the absence of an effective international agreement. Each period, countries extract carbon from the global ecosystem. A country's output depends both on its carbon usage and on the ecosystem ("stored carbon"). The desired mix...

We study the relative performance of disclosure and auditing in organizations. We consider the information transmission problem between two decision makers who take actions at dates 1 and 2 respectively. The first decision maker has private information about a state of nature that is relevant...

This paper introduces a class of games designed to study dynamic, endogenous reform of political institutions. Dynamic political games (DPGs) are dynamic games in which institutional choice is both recursive and instrumental. Future political aggregation rules are decided under current ones, and...

This paper adopts a revealed preference" approach to the question of what can be inferred about bias in a political system. We model an economy and its political system from the point of view of an outside observer." The observer sees a finite sequence of policy data, but does not observe either...

Examples of repeated destructive behavior abound throughout the history of human societies. This paper examines the role of social memory --- a society's vicarious beliefs about the past --- in creating and perpetuating destructive conflicts. We examine whether such behavior is consistent with...

This paper examines the mechanics of intertemporal information provision in dynastic governments. It has been suggested that "horizontal accountability," i.e., a system of governance where auditing functions lie outside the executive branch, can ensure credible disclosure of information. The...

This paper examines characteristics of cooperative behavior in a repeated, n-person, continuous action generalization of a Prisoner's Dilemma game. When time preferences are heterogeneous and bounded away from one, how "much" cooperation can be achieved by an ongoing group? How does group...