In recent years, financial regulators have come under increasing judicial scrutiny for conducting inadequate cost/benefit assessments in advance of significant reforms. One facet of this scrutiny is judicial skepticism towards the proper role for regulatory experimentation (and the real option...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an outside expert with informational superiority to a group of people who make a decision by voting on a proposal. An outside expert who observes the qualities of a proposal sends a cheap talk message to decision makers with limited...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an expert with informational superiority to decision makers who vote on a proposal. We show that an expert's simple cheap talk strategy can be surprisingly effective in persuading decision makers by polarizing or unifying their...

We consider a dynamic model featuring two firms that test a regulator’s enforcement propensity through their misconduct and a regulator that disciplines them to build a reputation for strict enforcement. We show that when the regulator has full discretion over the enforcement criterion, peer...

Formal models in political science typically consider actors with differing interests or ideologies, but political actors often have “good faith disagreements” about how to achieve commonly shared goals. We develop a model of a hierarchical political organization in which a principal and an...