We consider the “and” communication device that receives inputs from two players and outputs the public signal yes if both messages are yes, and outputs no otherwise. We prove that no correlation can securely be implemented using this device, even when infinitely many stages of communication...

Experts are asked to provide their advice in a situation of uncertainty. They adopt the decision maker’s utility function, but each has a potentially different set of prior probabilities, and so does the decision maker. The decision maker and the experts maximize the minimal expected utility...

The head of an organization is viewed as dealing with an optimization problem under a variety of constraints. The bureaucracy, by contrast, is viewed as dealing with the constraints alone: it has to make a multitude of low-level decisions, in such a way that no constraint is violated. However,...

We study the role of observability in bargaining with correlated values. Short-run buyers sequentially submit offers to one seller. When previous offers are observable, bargaining is likely to end up in an impasse. In contrast, when offers are hidden, agreement is always reached, although with...

We offer a new representation for the space of conditional systems on a finite set. We prove its equivalence with the usual representations, and use it to give short proofs of several known results.

This paper characterizes an equilibrium payoff subset for Markovian games with private information as discounting vanishes. Monitoring is imperfect, transitions may depend on actions, types be correlated and values interdependent. The focus is on equilibria in which players report truthfully....

In developing countries with weak institutions, there is implicitly a large reliance on elections to instill norms of accountability and reduce corruption. In this paper we show that electoral discipline may be ineffective in reducing corruption when political competition is too high or too low....

We study two-player discounted repeated games in which one player cannot monitor the other unless he pays a fixed amount. It is well known that in such a model the folk theorem holds when the monitoring cost is on the order of magnitude of the stage payoff. We analyze high frequency games in...

We study how the launching of a do-not-spam registry will affect the internet's efficiency. We show that as long as the cost of sending spam messages is not high, having rich users (who have high-quality filters) join the registry has the desirable effect of lowering the number of spam messages...

We provide a model to study the effect of improving the quality of the filters that users use, and the increase of the cost of mailing spam messages, on the total number of messages that spammers send. We show that increasing the cost of mailing spam messages have the unequivocal effect of...