I use game-theoretical models to compare a sender's expected payoff under two methods of wielding influence under incomplete information: offering rewards or threatening punishments. Attempts to influence another's behaviour can have the perverse effect of actually encouraging the behaviour that...

Two individuals are involved in a conflict situation in which preferences are ex ante uncertain. While they eventually learn their own preferences, they have to pay a small cost if they want to learn their opponent's preferences. We show that, for sufficiently small positive costs of information...

Anchoring is one of the most studied and robust behavioral biases, but there is little knowledge about its persistence in strategic settings. This article studies the role of anchoring bias in private-value auctions. We test experimentally two different anchor types. The announcement of a random...

We study repeated games in which players learn the unknown state of the world by observing a sequence of noisy private signals. We find that for generic signal distributions, the folk theorem obtains using ex-post equilibria. In our equilibria, players commonly learn the state, that is, the...

We define and analyze a "strategic topology'' on types in the Harsanyi-Mertens-Zamir universal type space, where two types are close if their strategic behavior is similar in all strategic situations. For a fixed game and action define the distance between a pair of types as the difference...

Kolmogorov's extension theorem provides a natural mapping from the space of coherent hierarchies of an agent's first-order, second- order, etc. beliefs to the space of probability measures over the exogenous parameters and the other agents' belief hierarchies. Mertens and Zamir (1985) showed...

Predictions under common knowledge of payoffs may differ from those under arbitrarily, but finitely, many orders of mutual knowledge; Rubinstein's (1989)Email game is a seminal example. Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) showed that the discontinuity in the example generalizes: for all types with...

Weinstein and Yildiz (Econometrica, 2007) have shown that only very weak predictions are robust to mispecifications of higher order beliefs. Whenever a type has multiple rationalizable actions, any of these actions is uniquely rationalizable for some arbitrarily close type. Hence, refinements of...

This paper studies incentives for the interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests. Considered are unfair contests, i.e., contests in which, subject to activity conditions, one player (the favorite) is interim always more likely to win than the other...

I investigate the decision problem of a player in a game of incomplete information who faces uncertainty about the other players' strategies. I propose a new decision criterion which works in two steps. First, I assume common knowledge of rationality and eliminate all strategies which are not...