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...

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange briefly adopted call auctions as its closing mechanism. We find evidence of abnormally large orders and price changes during the last five seconds of the auction sessions. Such sniping attacks were associated with the expiration of derivative products, which provided...

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no...

We develop a general model, with the exponential bandit as a special case, in which high-ability agents are more likely to achieve early success but also learn faster that their project is not promising. These counteracting effects give rise to a signaling model in which the single-crossing...

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no...

We examine how no-fault divorce law affects the age at first marriage, when everyone has a different value of marriage. The heterogeneity of individual values implies an unambiguous negative effect on the variance of marriage age. We test this hypothesis with marriage records from 1970 to 1995....

This paper provides a general analysis of signaling under double-crossing preferences with a continuum of types. There are natural economic environments where the indifference curves of two types cross twice, such that the celebrated single-crossing property fails to hold. Equilibrium exhibits a...

Population size and the level of income per capita are major determinants of the number of medals won by a country in the 1952-2004 Olympic Games. A parsimonious count (Poisson) model fits the data very well: the squared correlation between the predicted value of the number of medals won and the...

I offer a competitive explanation for the rush toward early contracting in matching markets. The explanation does not rely on market power, strategic motives, or instability of the assignment mechanism. Uncertainty about workers' ability will produce inefficient matching if contracts are formed...