The paper considers the communication complexity (measured in bits or real numbers) of Nash implementation of social choice rules. A key distinction is whether we restrict to the traditional one-stage mechanisms or allow multi-stage mechanisms. For one-stage mechanisms, the paper shows that for...

This paper analyzes the optimal provision of incentives in a dynamic information acquisition process. In every period, the agent can acquire costly information that is relevant to the principal's decision. Each signal may or may not provide definitive evidence in favor of the good state. Neither...

We investigate situations in which agents can communicate to each other only through a chain of intermediators, for example because they have to obey institutionalized communication protocols. We assume that all involved in the communication are strategic, and might want to influence the action...

Following Kreps (1979), I consider a decision maker who is uncertain about her future taste. This uncertainty leaves the decision maker with a preference for flexibility: When choosing among menus containing alternatives for future choice, she weakly prefers menus with additional alternatives....

A committee decides by unanimity whether to accept the current alternative, or to continue costly search. Each alternative is described by a vector of distinct attributes, and each committee member can privately assess the quality of one attribute (her "specialty"). Preferences are heterogeneous...

We develop a model of information exchange through communication and investigate its implications for information aggregation in large societies. An \textit{underlying state} determines payoffs from different actions. Agents decide which others to form a costly \textit{communication link} with,...

A speaker attempts to persuade a listener to accept a request by presenting evidence. A persuasion rule specifies what evidence is persuasive. This paper compares static and dynamic rules. We present a single linear program (i) whose solution corresponds to the listener's optimal dynamic rule...

We solve a long-term contracting problem with symmetric uncertainty about the agent's quality, and a hidden action of the agent. As information about quality accumulates, incentives become easier to provide because the agent has less room to manipulate the principal's beliefs. This result is...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

A game of incomplete information can be decomposed into a basic game and an information structure. The basic game defines the set of actions, the set of payoff states the payoff functions and the common prior over the payoff states. The information structure refers to the signals that the...