The common prior assumption is pervasive in game-theoretic models with incomplete information. This paper investigates experimentally the importance of inducing a common prior in a two-person signaling game. For a specific probability distribution of the sender's type, the long-run behavior...

Field evidence suggests that people belonging to the same group often behave similarly, i.e., behavior exhibits social interaction effects. We conduct a laboratory experiment that avoids the identification problem present in the field and allows us to study the behavioral logic of social...

One lingering puzzle is why voluntary contributions to public goods decline over time in experimental and real-world settings. We show that the decline of cooperation is driven by individual preferences for imperfect conditional cooperation. Many people's desire to contribute less than others,...

In the context of an infinitely repeated capacity-constrained price game, we endogenize the composition of a cartel when .rms are heterogeneous in their capacities. When .rms are sufficiently patient, there exists a stable cartel involving the largest .rms. A .rm with sufficiently small capacity...

To explore the efficacy of a corporate leniency program, a Markov process is constructed which models the stochastic formation and demise of cartels. Cartels are born when given the opportunity and market conditions are right, while cartels die because of internal collapse or they are caught and...

If an antitrust authority chooses policies to maximize the number of successfully prosecuted cartels, when do those policies also serve to minimize the number of cartels that form? When the detection and prosecution of cartels is inherently difficult, we find that an antitrust authority's...

It is widely admitted that the inverse problem of estimating the distribution of a latent variable X* from an observed sample of X, a contaminated measurement of X*, is ill-posed. This paper shows that measurement error models for self-reporting data are well-posed, assuming the probability of...

In this paper we analyze a legislative bargaining game in which parties privately informed about their preferences bargain over an ideological and a distributive decision. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. When the private...

Prior research on 'strategic voting' has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...