In this paper, we provide an explanation of the democratic peace hypothesis, i.e., the observation that democracies rarely fight one another. We show that in the presence of information asymmetries and strategic complements, the strategic interaction between two democracies differs from any...

In this paper we analyze elections when voters underestimate the correlation between their information sources ("correlation neglect"). We find that this cognitive bias can improve political outcomes. We show that the extreme beliefs which result from correlation neglect induce some voters to...

We analyze preferences over redistribution in societies with costly (positive) sorting according to income. We identify a new motivation for redistribution, where individuals support taxation in order to reduce the incentives to sort. We characterize a simple condition over income distributions...

We analyze a cheap talk game, à la Crawford and Sobel, in a multidimensional state and policy space. A feature of the multidimensional state space is that communication on one dimension often reveals information on others. We show how this feature imposes bounds on communication. Copyright The...

In this Paper, we provide an explanation of the democratic peace hypothesis, i.e., the observation that democracies rarely fight one another. We show that in the presence of information asymmetries and strategic complements, the strategic interaction between two democracies differs from any...

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...

In this Paper we extend the cheap talk model of Crawford and Sobel (1982) to a multidimensional state space and policy space. We provide a characterization of equilibria. We focus on the question of feasibility of information transmission, for large degrees of conflict of interests between the...

In this paper, we extend the cheap talk model of Crawford and Sobel (1982) to a multidimensional state space. We provide a characterization of informative equilibria. Most importantly, we prove for a generic family of distribution functions, that no information transmission is feasible when the...

This paper provides a theoretical explanation for the democratic peace hypothesis (i.e., the observation that democracies rarely fight one another). We show that, when information asymmetries and strategic complements are present in the conflict resolution game, the strategic interaction between...