A model of group decision-making is studied, in which one of two alternatives must be chosen. While group members differ in their valuations of the alternatives, everybody prefers some alternative to disagreement. Our model is distinguished by three features: private information regarding...

We analyze the structure of a society driven by power relations. Our model has an exogenous power relation over the set of coalitions of agents. Agents determine the social order by forming coalitions. The power relations determine the ranking of agents in society for any social order. We study...

We propose a model of religious organizations which relies on the ability of such organi-zations and personal utility shocks. We show how religious organizations arise endogenously and characterize their features. Specifically, we find that members of the religious organization share similar...

We model an individual who wants to learn about a state of the world. The individual has a prior belief, and has data which consists of multiple forecasts about the state of the world. Our key assumption is that the decision maker identifies explanations that could have generated this data and...

The focus of this paper is the endogenous formation of peer groups. We study a model in which agents choose their peers prior to making decisions on multiple issues. Agents differ in how much they value the decision outcomes on one issue relative to another. While each individual can collect...

This paper uses a new data set on domestic child adoption to document the preferences of potential adoptive parents over born and unborn babies relinquished for adoption by their birth mothers. We show that adoptive parents exhibit significant biases in favor of girls and against...

We study a dynamic matching environment where individuals arrive sequentially. There is a tradeoff between waiting for a thicker market, allowing for higher-quality matches, and minimizing agents' waiting costs. The optimal mechanism cumulates a stock of incongruent pairs up to a threshold and...