We conduct an experimental analysis of pretrial bargaining, while allowing for the costly voluntary disclosure of private information in a screening game. In this game, the theoretical prediction is that costly voluntary disclosures will not occur. This hinges on the prediction that the person...

In games with strategic complementarities, public information about the state of the world has a larger impact on equilibrium actions than private information of the same precision, because public signals are more informative about the likely behavior of others. We present an experiment in which...

Transparency has become an almost universal virtue among central banks. The paper tests empirically, for the case of the Federal Reserve, two hypotheses about central bank transparency derived from the debate of Morris and Shin (2002) and Svensson (2006). First, the paper finds that the...

How should an organization's center allocate resources to units under its control which are better informed? Even with conscientious productivity reviews, important information will remain asymmetrically held. If units value their own expenditures more than those of their peers, they will seek...

We introduce a class of two-player dynamic games to study the effectiveness of screening in a principal-agent problem. In every period, the principal chooses either to irreversibly stop the game or to continue, and the agent chooses an action if the principal chooses to continue. The agent's...

We consider a game of information transmission, with one informed decision maker gathering information from one or more informed senders. Private information is (conditionally) correlated across players, and communication is cheap talk. For the one sender case, we show that correlation...

When the information used by a principal to monitor an agent is private, and thus non-verifiable by a third party, the principal has a credibility issue with the agent. The agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information in order to collect a monetary penalty from...