This paper examines the effectiveness of cheap talk when the receiver is imperfectly informed. We show that the receiver’s prior knowledge becomes an impediment to efficient communication in a model with the discrete state space: in general, the more the receiver is informed, the less...

We consider a bandit problem faced by a team of two heterogeneous players. The team is hierarchical in that one (the principal) retains the exclusive right to terminate the project while the other (the agent) focuses strictly on implementing the project assigned to him. As a key departure, we...

In many facets of life, we often face competition with a multilayered structure in which different levels of competition take place simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a new class of tournament models, called multilayered tournaments, to capture this type of competitive environment. Among...

Timing of market entry is one of the most important strategic decisions a firm must make, but its decision process becomes convoluted with information and payoff spillovers. The threat of competition pushes firms to enter earlier to preempt their rivals while the possibility of learning make...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic signaling model of an R&D market in which a researcher can choose either a safe project (exploitation) or a risky project (exploration) at each instance. We argue that there are substantial efficiency gains from rewarding minor innovations above their social...

We develop a general model, with the exponential bandit as a special case, in which high-ability agents are more likely to achieve early success but also learn faster that their project is not promising. These counteracting effects give rise to a signaling model in which the single-crossing...

This paper provides a dynamic game of market entry to illustrate entry dynamics in an uncertain market environment. Our model features both private learning about the market condition and market competition, which give rise to the first-mover and secondmover advantages in a unified framework. We...

A standard incomplete-information war of attrition is extended to incorporate experimentation and private learning. We obtain a characterization of all equilibria in this extended setup and use this setup to illuminate a tradeoff between short-run and long-run gains of experimentation. The...