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 the former is more informative about the likely behavior of others. This may lead to welfare-reducing...

We compare behavior in Weber's (2001) Dirty Faces Game with that in a modified version. The modifified version is designed to reduce the level of strategic uncertainty by ruling out some equilibria in weakly dominated strategies. We find that in the three-player version of the game reduced...

This chapter studies how incomplete information helps accommodate frictions in coordination, leading to novel insights on the joint determination of expectations and macroeconomic outcomes. We review and synthesize recent work on global games, beauty contests, and their applications. We...

This chapter studies how incomplete information helps accommodate frictions in coordination, leading to novel insights on the joint determination of expectations and macroeconomic outcomes. We review and synthesize recent work on global games, beauty contests, and their applications. We...

We enrich workhorse macroeconomic models with a mechanism that proxies strategic uncertainty and that manifests itself as waves of optimism and pessimism about the short-term economic outlook. We interpret this mechanism as variation in "confidence" and show that it helps account for many...