We consider a game of information transmission, with one informed decision maker gathering information from one or more informed senders. Private information is (conditionally) correlated across players, and communication is cheap talk. For the one sender case, we show that correlation...

Some labor markets have recently developed formal signalling mechanisms, e.g. the signalling for interviews in the job market for new Ph.D. economists. We evaluate the effect of such mechanisms on two-sided matching markets by considering a game of incomplete information between firms and...

A firm can merge with one of n potential partners. The owner of each firm has private information about both his firm's stand-alone value and a component of the synergies that would be realized by the merger involving his firm. We characterize incentive-efficient mechanisms in two cases. First,...

We introduce two pieces of information, denoted memes, into a diffusion process in which memes are transmitted when individuals meet and forgotten at an exogenous rate. At most one meme can be transmitted at a meeting, which introduces opportunity costs in the process. Individuals differ...

We consider an auction setting in which potential buyers, even if they fail to obtain the good, care about the price paid by the winner. We study the impact of these price-externalities on the first-price auction and the second-price auction in a symmetric information framework. First, we...

We show that lenders join a U.S. commercial credit bureau when information asymmetries between incumbents and entrants create an adverse selection problem that hinders market entry. Lenders also delay joining when information asymmetries protect them from competition in existing markets,...

We study a dynamic model of opinion formation in social networks. In our model, boundedly rational agents update opinions by averaging over their neighbors' expressed opinions, but may misrepresent their own opinion by conforming or counter-conforming with their neighbors. We show that an...

This paper models the dynamic process through which a large society may succeed in building up its social capital by establishing a stable and dense pattern of interaction among its members. In the model, agents interact according to a collection of infinitely repeated Prisoner's Dilemmas played...

We study private communication in social networks prior to a majority vote on two alternative policies. Some (or all) agents receive a private imperfect signal about which policy is correct. They can, but need not, recommend a policy to their neighbors in the social network prior to the vote. We...