Sellers often make explicit or implicit product claims without providing evidence. We show that such "puffery" of product attributes through pure cheap talk is credible and helps buyers make a better decision. Puffing one attribute of a product leads buyers to positively update their impression...

This paper is concerned with the dynamics of competition in American political campaigns, in particular with how the type of message a candidate sends is affected by the stage of the campaign, the status of the candidate, and the competitiveness of the race. The paper examines the allocation of...

A motivation for central bank independence (CBI) is that policy delegation helps politicians manage diverse coalitions. This paper develops a model of coalition formation that predicts when delegation will occur. An analysis of policy preferences survey data and CBI indicators supports the...

Bazaar governance tries to describe how market power is exercised. It involves a study of cooperation and coercion in bazaar. It is about solidarity, monopoly, networking and hierarchies. The informal nature of bazaar avoids the need to have any size distribution of governance. In other words,...

We consider the credibility, persuasiveness, and informativeness of multi-dimensional cheap talk by an expert to a decision maker. We find that an expert with state-independent preferences can always make credible comparative statements that trade off the expert's incentive to exaggerate on each...

A group of people with identical preferences but different abilities in identifying the best alternative (e.g., a jury) takes a vote to decide between two alternatives. The first best voting rule is a weighted voting rule that takes into account the different individual competences, and is...

It is found that the “Theory of Moves” is adequate in a Cold War scenario, with functionally equal participants, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The destabilization of normal incentive systems, under power and information asymmetry, is what prevents an equilibrium from being reached, as...

This paper compares the ability to select the efficient policy of a parliamentary and a presidential constitutional setup. In order to do it we build a dynamic theoretical model with asymmetric information that succeeds in addressing both the politicians accountability and the competence...

We allow a contest organizer to bias a contest in a discriminatory way; i.e., she can favor specific contestants by designing the contest rule in order to maximize total equilibrium effort (resp. revenue). The two predominant contest regimes are considered, all-pay auctions and lottery contests....

In using their citizen candidate framework, Besley and Coate (2001) fi nd that if citizen candidates with sufficiently extreme preferences are available, lobbying has no in fluence on equilibrium policy. I show that this result does not hold in a model with ideological parties instead of citizen...