Previous analyses of arms races and proliferation are integrated and extended, building from a treatment of the behavioral foundations of weapons acquisitions to a general theory of arms races, with implications for the role of negotiations, the balance of power, the timing of crises, and...

We analyze communication about the social returns to investment in a public good. We model two agents who have private information about these returns as well as their own taste for cooperation, or social preferences. Before deciding to contribute or not, each agent submits an unverifiable...

We study a standard collective action problem in which successful achievement of a group interest requires costly participation by some fraction of its members. How should we model the internal organization of these groups when there is asymmetric information about the preferences of their...

We investigate experimentally whether individuals or groups are more lied to, and how lying depends on the group size and the monetary loss inflicted by the lie. We employ an observed cheating game, where an individual's misreport of a privately observed number can monetarily benefit her while...