Sellers benefit on average from revealing information about their goods to buyers, but the incentive to exaggerate undermines the credibility of seller statements. When multiple goods are being auctioned, we show that ordinal cheap talk, which reveals a complete or partial ordering of the...

Why do some U.S. states have higher levels of marital formation than others? This paper introduces an economic model wherein a state's representative individual may choose to marry in order to diversity his or her idiosyncratic income risk. The paper demonstrates that such a diversification...

We construct a simple firm-based automata model for global economic inter-dependence of countries using modern notions of self-organized criticality and recently developed dynamical-renormalization-group methods (e.g., L. Pietronero et al., Phys. Rev. Lett., 72(11):1690 (1994); J. Hasty and K....

Bargaining over two issues as a bundle permits credible cheap talk about their relative importance even when interests are directly opposed on each issue. The resulting communication gains can exceed the gains from bundling previously identified in the monopoly pricing literature.