A principal hires an agent to acquire costly information that will influence the decision of a third party. While the realized piece of information is observable and contractible, the experimental process is not. Assuming a general family of information cost functions (inclusive of Shannon's...

An entrepreneur contracts with a consultant, who is protected by limited liability, to supply information about the state of a project prior to investing in it. For a given level of investment, a good project succeeds with higher probability than a bad one. The entrepreneur makes an upfront...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in macro models with heterogeneity in information and complementarity in actions. These models deliver promising positive properties, such as heightened inertia and volatility. But they also raise important normative questions, such as whether...

In recent years there has been a growing interest in macro models with heterogeneity in information and complementarity in actions. These models deliver promising positive properties, such as heightened inertia and volatility. But they also raise important normative questions, such as whether...

In his work on market signaling, Spence proposed a dynamic model of a signaling market in which a buyer revises prices in light of experience and sellers choose utility-maximizing signals given these prices. Spence also suggested that subjecting the dynamic process to rare perturbations might...

The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this auction. We provide such an analysis for the two-player case with complete and incomplete...

In a two-stage extensive form game where followers can observe moves by leaders only with noise, pure subgame perfect Nash equilibria of the limiting game without noise may not survive arbitrarily small noise. Still, for generic games, there is always at least one subgame perfect equilibrium...

This paper performs a welfare analysis of economies with private information when public information is endogenously generated and agents can condition on noisy public statistics in the rational expectations tradition. We find that equilibrium is not (restricted) efficient even when feasible...

This paper performs a welfare analysis of economies with private information when public information is endogenously generated and agents can condition on noisy public statistics in the rational expectations tradition. We find that equilibrium is not (restricted) efficient even when feasible...

In an information cascade experiment participants are confronted with artificial predecessors predicting in line with the BHW model (Bikchandani et al. 1992). Using the BDM (Becker et al., 1964) mechanism we study participants' probability perceptions based on maximum prices for participating in...