We consider the problem of a leader who can assign rewards for citizens for different anti-regime actions. Citizens face a coordination problem in which each citizen has a private, endogenous degree of optimism about the likelihood of regime change. Because more optimistic citizens are easier to...

We formalize Tilly's (1978, 2006, 2008) concept of repertoires of contentious actions, and analyze how the structure of state repression affects the variety of observed contentious actions. Introducing the notion of repertoire width, we show that when state repression accelerates with higher...

Some private-monitoring games, that is, games with no public histories, can have histories that are almost public. These games are the natural result of perturbing public monitoring games towards private monitoring. We explore the extent to which it is possible to coordinate continuation play in...

In a general interdependent preference environment, we characterize when two payoff types can be distinguished by their rationalizable strategic choices without any prior knowledge of their beliefs and higher order beliefs. We show that two payoff types are strategically distinguishable if and...

A game of incomplete information can be decomposed into a basic game and an information structure. The basic game defines the set of actions, the set of payoff states the payoff functions and the common prior over the payoff states. The information structure refers to the signals that the...

We characterize revenue maximizing mechanisms in a common value environment where the value of the object is equal to the highest of bidders’ independent signals. If the object is optimally sold with probability one, then the optimal mechanism is simply a posted price, with the highest...

A universal type space of interdependent expected utility preference types is constructed from higher-order preference hierarchies describing (i) an agent's (unconditional) preferences over a lottery space; (ii) the agent's preference over Anscombe-Aumann acts conditional on the unconditional...

This essay is the introduction for a collection of papers by the two of us on "Robust Mechanism Design" to be published by World Scientific Publishing. The appendix of this essay lists the chapters of the book.The objective of this introductory essay is to provide the reader with an overview of...

We analyze the welfare consequences of a monopolist having additional information about consumers' tastes, beyond the prior distribution; the additional information can be used to charge different prices to different segments of the market, i.e., carry out "third degree price discrimination."We...

We study how the outcomes of a private-value first price auction can vary with bidders information, for a fixed distribution of private values. In a two bidder, two value, setting, we characterize all combinations of bidder surplus and revenue that can arise, and identify the information...