In this paper we examine the strategic savviness of the medieval church as portrayed in Richard Wagner's Tannhäuser. We show that the church employed an optimal randomization strategy based on arguments of dominance or trembling-hand perfection. Particular attention is paid to the employed...

We introduce a new model of aggregate information cascades where only one of two possible actions is observable to others. Agents make a binary decision in sequence. The order is random and agents are not aware of their own position in the sequence. When called upon, they are only informed about...

We study a model of competition among polling stations where polling stations have to invest in counting precision to attract voters. The benchmark is the (current) monopolistic case in which there is no incentive to provide particularly good counting technologies. Unsurprisingly, we find that...

We examine the effects of different forms of feedback information on the performance of markets that suffer from moral hazard problems due to sequential exchange. As orthodox theory would predict, we find that providing buyers with information about sellers' trading history boosts market...