We use laboratory experiments to compare allocation rules in uniform price divisible good auctions. 'Standard' and 'uniform' allocation rules admit different types of low-price equilibria, which are eliminated by a 'hybrid' rule. We observe little evidence of revenue differences among the...

We model organizational decision making as costless pre-play communication. Decision making is called authoritarian if only one player is allowed to speak and consensual if all players are allowed to speak. Players are assumed to have limited cognitive capacity and we characterize their behavior...

This note reconsiders communication between an informed expert and an uninformed decision maker with a strategic mediator in a discrete Crawford and Sobel (1982) setting. We show that a strategic mediator may improve communication even when he is biased into the same direction as the expert. The...

Precedents can facilitate successful coordination within groups by reducing strategic uncertainty, but they may lead to coordination failure when two groups with diverging precedents have to interact. This paper describes an experiment to explore how such coordination failure can be mitigated...

Numerous studies suggest that communication may be a universal means to mitigate collective action problems. In this study, we challenge this view and show that the communication structure crucially determines whether communication mitigates or intensifies the problem of collective action. We...

One-way communication has been found to substantially increase contributions in linear voluntary contribution mechanisms. We confirm the robustness of this result in the presence of income heterogeneity.

We analyze the performance of various communication protocols in a generalization of the Crawford-Sobel (1982) model of cheap talk that allows for multiple receivers. We find that whenever the sender can communicate informatively with both receivers by sending private messages, she can...

Abstract: In the dynamic game we analyze, players are the members of a ?xed network. Everyone is initially endowed with an information item that he is the only player to hold. Players are offered a ?nite number of periods to centralize the initially dispersed items in the hands of any one member...

Can comparative statements be credible even when absolute statements are not? For instance, can a professor credibly rank different students for a prospective employer even if she has an incentive to exaggerate the merits of each student? Or can an analyst credibly rank different stocks even if...