Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass (a barrier to coordination) must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of the alternatives respond to the underlying mood of the party. An individual's...

Party activists wish to (i) advocate the best policy and yet (ii) unify behind a common party line. An activist's understanding of his environment is based on the speeches of party leaders. A leader's influence, measured by the weight placed on her speech, increases with her judgement on policy...

Party activists face a coordination problem: a critical mass (a barrier to coordination) must advocate a single policy alternative if the party is to succeed. The need for direction is the degree to which the merits of the alternatives respond to the underlying mood of the party. An individual's...

We broaden and develop the classic captive-and-shopper model of sales. Firstly, we allow for asymmetric marginal costs as well as asymmetric captive audiences. These asymmetries jointly determine the identities of the two or more firms we find compete (via randomized sales) to serve shoppers. In...

We study a Cournot industry in which each firm sells multiple quality-differentiated products. We use an upgrades approach, working not with the actual products but instead with upgrades from one quality to the next. The properties of single-product models carry over to the supply of upgrades,...

In a Lucas-Phelps island economy, an island has access to many informative signals about demand conditions. Each signal incorporates both public and private information: the correlation of a signal׳s realizations across the economy determines its publicity. If information sources differ in...

In the context of a "beauty-contest" coordination game (in which pay-offs depend on the quadratic distance of actions from an unobserved state variable and from the average action), players choose how much costly attention to pay to various informative signals. Each signal has an underlying...

Collective action problems arise in a variety of situations. The economic theory of public good provision raises a number of important questions. Who contributes to the public good, and who free rides? How might a social planner exploit the interdependence of decision-making to encourage...