We analyze conditions under which campaign rhetoric may affect the beliefs of the voters over what policy will be implemented by the winning candidate of an election. We develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological. We analyze an...

Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only...

We examine an economy in which the cost of consuming some goods can be reduced by making commitments to consumption levels independent of the state. For example, it is cheaper to produce housing services via owner-occupied than rented housing, but the transactions costs associated with the...

What determines which assets are used in transactions? We develop a framework where the extent to which assets are recognizable determines the extent to which they are acceptable in exchange - i.e., their liquidity. We analyze the effects of monetary policy on asset markets. Recognizability and...

There is a large repeated games literature illustrating how future interactions provide incentives for cooperation. Much of the earlier literature assumes public monitoring. Departures from public monitoring to private monitoring that incorporate differences in players’ observations may...

In McLean and Postlewaite (2002), we analyzed pure exchange economies with asymmetrically informed agents. We defined a notion of informational size and showed that, when the aggregate information of all agents resolves nearly all the uncertainty regarding the state of nature, the conflict...

We analyze conditions under which a candidate's campaign rhetoric may affect the beliefs of the voters over what policy the candidate will implement in case he wins the election. We develop a model of repeated elections with complete information in which candidates are purely ideological....

In McLean and Postlewaite (2001), we analyzed a general equilibrium model with asymetrically informed agents. We presented a notion of informational size and showed (among other things) that when agents' information as a whole resolved nearly all the uncertainty, the conflict between incentive...

Savage (1954) provided a set of axioms on preferences over acts that were equivalent to the existence of an expected utility representation. We show that in addition to this representation, there is a continuum of other "expected utility" representations in which for any act, the probability...

We consider repeated games with private monitoring that are 'close' to repeated games with public/perfect monitoring. A private monitoring information structure is close to a public monitoring information structure when private signals can generate approximately the same distribution of the...