We propose adding a third,intermediate,verdict to the two-verdict used in criminal trials. We show that the additional verdict can be used to distinguish between convicted defendants, based on the residual doubt regarding their guilt at the end of the trial, in a way that improves welfare and...

We investigate a common-value labor setting in which firms interview a worker prior to hiring. When firms have private information about the worker’s value and interview decisions are kept private, many firms may enter the market, interview, and hire with positive probability. When firms’...

We provide conditions that simplify applying Reny's (1999) better-reply security to Bayesian games, and use these conditions to prove the existence of equilibria for classes of games in which payoff discontinuities arise only at "ties." These games include a general version of all-pay contests,...

Many sales, sports, and research contests are put in place to maximize contestants' performance. We investigate and provide a complete characterization of the prize structures that achieve this objective in settings with many contestants. The contestants may be ex-ante asymmetric in their...

Cooperative concepts of renegotiation in repeated games have typically assumed that Paretoranked equilibria could not coexist within the same renegotiation-proof set. With explicit renegotiation, however, a proposal to move to a Pareto-superior equilibrium can be deterred by a different...

We study social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model, emphasizing the trade-off between marginal innovation (combining existing technologies) and radical innovation (breaking new ground). We characterize both short-term and long-term dynamics of innovation, and the...

How does renegotiation affect contracts between a principal and an agent subject to persistent private information and moral hazard? This paper introduces a concept of renegotiation-proofness, which adapts to stochastic games the concepts of weak renegotiation-proofness and internal consistency...

This paper argues that, to be forward-looking in a logically consistent sense, a decision maker must take account of his overall well-being, not just his instantaneous utility, in all future periods. However, such a decision-maker is necessarily time inconsistent. The paper explores the...

In many economic applications involving comparisons of multivariate distributions, supermodularity of an objective function is a natural property for capturing a preference for greater interdependence. One multivariate distribution dominates another according to the supermodular stochastic...