Previous results on political cycles as a signal of competency assumed that opportunism was common knowledge. If opportunism is not common knowledge, there may be a partially pooling equilibrium where cycles indicate opportunism rather than competency. Insofar as more discretionality increases...

We scrutinize the use of value at risk as traders' limit in banks. Thereby, we compare a bank with uninformed traders dealing on a perfect capital market, with a bank in which traders receive a noisy signal about the future price of the stock they are dealing in. Additionally, they are able to...

We offer a model to explain why groups of people sometimes converge upon poor decisions and are prone to fads, even though they can discuss the outcomes of their choices. Models of informational herding or cascades have examined how rational individuals learn by observing predecessors' actions,...

Group decision making is commonly used in juries, businesses, and in politics to increase the informational basis for a decision and to improve decision accuracy. Recent work on generalizing Condercet's jury theorem provides a compelling justification for using groups in this manner. But these...

This essay considers the role of reputational information in our marketplace. It explains how well-functioning marketplaces depend on the vibrant flow of accurate reputational information, and how misdirected regulation of reputational information could harm marketplace mechanisms. It then...