What is the optimal size of expert committees? To address this question, I present a model of a committee of experts with career concerns. Each expert may observe an argument about the state of the world and is unsure about the argument s soundness. Experts may remain silent or compete for the...

We build a model of collective reputation under moral hazard to analyze incentives under collective reputation. Producers can produce high quality, but it is only imperfectly detected. Products not detected as of high quality are pooled by to the collective reputation structure. Collective...

We analyze different committee designs in a model with the endogenous participation of experts who have private information about their own abilities. Each committee design involves a test of abilities whose accuracy influences experts’ decisions to participate. We derive the following...

This paper studies optimal auction design when the seller can affect the buyers' valuations through an unobservable ex ante investment. The key insight is that the optimal mechanism may have the seller play a mixed investment strategy so as to create correlation between the otherwise...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. Sellers quote prices strategically, inducing a knapsack game. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal...

Governments must usually take policy decisions with an imperfect knowledge of the economic actors' type or the actors' effort level. These issues are addressed within the framework of classic adverse selection or moral hazard models. I discuss in this paper how would the government's and the...

We integrate monetary policy-making by committee into a New Keynesian model to assess the consequences of the committee's institutional characteristics for inflation, output, and welfare. Our analysis delivers the following results. First, we demonstrate that transparency about the committee's...

We exploit a recent change in voting procedures in one of the two chambers of the Swiss parliament to explore how transparency affects the votes of Members of Parliament (MPs). Until 2013, the Council of States (St nderat) decided by hand rising. While publicly observable at the time of the...

This paper concerns the attractiveness for member ship in Swedish golf clubs. A representative voter model is derived and the attractiveness for member ship in golf clubs estimated using a unique data set on qualities of the golf course, the quality of neighboring courses and characteristics...

We analyse river sharing games in which a set of agents located along a river shares the available water. Using coalition theory, we find that the potential benefits of water trade may not be su cient to make all agents in the river cooperate and acknowledge property rights as a prerequisite for...