Community enforcement is an important device for sustaining efficiency in some repeated games of cooperation. We investigate cooperation when information about players' reputations spreads to their future partners through links in a social network that connects them. We find that information...

Decentralized matching markets on the internet allow large numbers of agents to interact anonymously at virtually no cost. Very little information is available to market participants and trade takes place at many different prices simultaneously. We propose a decentralized, completely uncoupled...

We model the decisions of young individuals to stay in school or drop-out and engage in criminal activities. We build on the literature on human capital and crime engagement and use the framework of Banerjee (1993) that assumes that the information needed to engage in crime arrives in the form...

Organizations design their communication structures to improve decision-making while limiting wasteful influence activities. An efficient communication protocol grants completeinformation payoffs to all organization members, thereby overcoming asymmetric information problems at no cost. This...

In many cases consumers cannot observe firms' investment in quality or safety, but have only beliefs on the average quality of the industry. In addition, the outcome of the collective investment game of the firms may be stochastic since firms cannot control perfectly the technology or external...

We survey the empirical literature in economics on the impact of media technologies on social capital. Motivated by a simple model of information and collective action, we cover a range of different outcomes related to social capital, from social and political participation to interpersonal...

A growing body of evidence suggests that people exhibit large biases when processing information about themselves, but less is known about the underlying inference process. This paper studies belief updating patterns regarding academic ability in a large sample of students transitioning from...

I analyze optimal natural resource use in an intergenerational model with the risk of a catastrophe. Each generation maximizes a weighted sum of discounted utility (positive) and the probability that a catastrophe will occur at any point in the future (negative). The model generates time-...

In e-commerce, where information collection is essentially costless and geographic location of traders matters very little, fierce competition between providers of similar services is expected. We consider a model where two e-commerce intermediaries (internet shops) compete for sellers. We show...

We consider a dynamic auction environment with a long-lived seller and short-lived buyers mediated by a third party. A mediator has incomplete information about traders' values and selects an auction mechanism to maximize her expected revenue. We characterize mediator-optimal mechanisms and show...