Oratorical talent and the ability to forge unity and bipartisanship have been touted as important qualifications for our next president. Many assert these traits are necessary to lead us out of our current quagmires, e.g. recession, war, and the crisis in health care. This article examines the...

This paper examines the usefulness of Coasian Transaction Cost Economics for describing the governance outcomes for semi-public markets, i.e. markets where some government involvement is indispensable, and where the government transacts with private parties, or provides the service in-house....

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an outside expert with informational superiority to a group of people who make a decision by voting on a proposal. An outside expert who observes the qualities of a proposal sends a cheap talk message to decision makers with limited...

We develop a model of strategic information transmission from an expert with informational superiority to decision makers who vote on a proposal. We show that an expert's simple cheap talk strategy can be surprisingly effective in persuading decision makers by polarizing or unifying their...

This paper questions the conventional wisdom that publication bias must result from the biased preferences of researchers. When readers only compare the number of positive and negative results of papers to make their decisions, even unbiased researchers will omit noisy null results and inflate...

We experimentally investigate (i) whether markets accurately assess the ability of decision makers when these decision makers benefit from positive assessments and (ii) how decision makers use a costly decision and cheap-talk statements to impress markets. We focus on committees of decision...

We study committees that acquire information, deliberate and vote. A member cares about state-dependent decision payoffs and about his reputation for expertise. The state remains unobserved, even after the decision has been taken. In such inconclusive environments, in equilibrium, a member's...

We study the optimal size and composition of an advisory committee when shareholders differ in preferences and beliefs and strategically acquire and communicate information. If shareholders and management have similar objectives but disagree due to different beliefs, and information is cheap,...

We study how different forms of social capital lead to different distributions of multidimensionalopinions by affecting the channels through which individuals communicate. We develop a model to compare and contrast the evolution of opinions between societies whose members communicate through...