In an assignment market with uncertainty regarding productive ability of participants, early contracting can occur as participants balance risk sharing and sorting efficiency. More promising agents may contract early with each other because insurance gains outweigh sorting inefficiency, whereas...

This paper proposes a theory of group formation based on the motive to seek informed opinion. Because an individual evaluates whether others are informed or not using his own priors, he identifies people with similar beliefs to be more informed than those with different beliefs. The result is an...

We present a model of delegation with self-interested and privately informed experts. A team of experts with extreme but opposite biases is acceptable to a wide range of decision makers with diverse preferences, but the value of expertise from such a team is low. A decision maker wants to...

When employers cannot tell whether a school truly has many good students or whether it is just giving easy grades, schools have an incentive to inflate grades to help their mediocre students. However schools also care about preserving the value of good grades for their good students. We...

In markets for entry-level professionals, the insurance motive drives some participants to sign early contracts. The rush to early contracting can be self-fulfilling, as both its effect on expectations about demand-supply balance in the subsequent spot market and the effect on it from changes in...

The class of double-crossing preferences, where signaling is cheaper for higher types than for lower types at low signaling levels and the opposite is true at high signaling levels, underlines the phenomenon of countersignaling. We show that under the D1 refinement, the equilibrium signaling...

Many committees---juries, political task forces, etc.---spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting...

Many committees—juries, political task forces, etc.—spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting...

A sender who wants to influence a decision maker has no incentive to collect information if he has to reveal all evidence so obtained, because the expected value of posterior belief is equal to the prior. If he can conceal his evidence at a cost, he invests more in obtaining information when...

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences. When members' preferences differ, the report submitted by any individual can not allow perfect...