We show theoretical and experimental results that demonstrate the potential of transparency to influence committee decision making and deliberation. We present a model in which committee members have career concerns and unanimity is needed to change the status quo. We study three scenarios -...

In a society composed of citizens and a dictator: what are the conditions for a successful citizens' revolt? What kind of strategies do governments follow to prevent such revolts? In this paper we argue that the concept of networks is a very powerful tool to understand these issues, as shown...

In our political-agency setting, voters are uninformed about two traits of an incumbent politician: ability and bias. Voters observe the implemented policy and learn the state immediately before the election. We show that when the bias of biased politicians is strong such that voters prefer...

This paper experimentally tests the effectiveness of three crowdsourced signaling mechanisms on their ability to resolve an asymmetric information problem over product quality for a set of consumers. Motivated by naturally occurring environments, the first mechanism allowed experimental subjects...

Will generous return policies in auctions benefit bidders? We investigate this issue using second-price common-value auctions. Theoretically, we find that the bidding equilibrium is unique unless returns are free, in which case there exist multiple equilibria with different implications for...

We report the results of a laboratory experiment based on a citizen‐candidate model with private information about ideal points. Inefficient political polarization is observed in all treatments; that is, citizens with extreme ideal points enter as candidates more often than moderate citizens....

We study experimentally the effectiveness of communication in common value committees exhibiting publicly known heterogeneous biases. We test models assuming respectively self-interested and strategic, joint payoff-maximizing and cognitively heterogeneous agents. These predict varying degrees of...

In a Bayesian persuasion setting, a sender persuades a receiver to take an action by designing and committing to disclose information about the receiver's payoff of taking the action. We propose a model that incorporates reciprocity into the Bayesian persuasion setting, using the approach of...

Social media have become a main source of information for many voters. Political interest groups on social media platforms have the ability to (i) microtarget news based on individual-level voter data and (ii) obfuscate their identities, which can be exploited to spread disinformation. Two...

Lobbying is studied in a series of signaling game experiments. Students as well as professional lobbyists are used as subjects. In contrast with some earlier studies, comparing students and professionals, we find significant differences in the behavior of the two subject pools. Professional...