The paper enriches a standard signaling model of education with issues of social distance defined over educational achievements. More specifically it considers the effects that the presence of conformist and status seeking individuals has on educational dynamics. Under very reasonable...

This paper studies how a signaling motive becomes a cause of excessive disobedience and an obstacle to authority in a dynamic relationship. It shows that an agent has incentive to disobey a principal's order so that the principal adjusts the future exercise of authority in the agent's favor. The...

This paper studies repeated communication regarding a multidimensional collective decision in a large population. When preferences coincide but beliefs about the consequences of the various decisions diverge, it is shown, under some specific assumptions, that public communication causes the...

Generally, Democrats do not increase military spending, and Republicans do not raise welfare payments. Mostly, ruling politicians stick to the manifesto of their party. The current paper provides a theoretical explanation for this phenomenon that does not assume politicians or voters to be...

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because incumbents only care about clearing a reelection...

We extend a model of wasteful state aid in Dewatripont and Seabright (2006, Journal of the European Economic Association 4, 513-522) by a supranational controlling authority. The model combines moral hazard and adverse selection to show that politicians fund wasteful projects to signal their...

This study develops a political competition model in which campaign platforms are partially binding. A candidate who implements a policy that differs from his/her platform must pay a cost of betrayal, which increases with the size of the discrepancy. I also assume that voters are uncertain about...

This paper investigates the role of persuasion mechanisms in collective decision-making. A biased sender adopts a Bayesian persuasion mechanism to provide a committee of uninformed receivers with signals about the unknown state of the world. We compare public persuasion with private persuasion....

This paper investigates the role of persuasion mechanisms in collective decision-making. A persuasion mechanism consists of a family of conditional distributions over the underlying state space and the generated noisy signals. A biased, perfectly informed sender adopts a persuasion mechanism to...

We present a model of persuasive signalling, where a privately-informed sender selects from a class of signals with different precision to persuade a receiver to take one of two actions. The sender's information could be either favourable or unfavourable. The receiver observes both the sender's...