I analyze the optimal information disclosure problem under commitment of a “contest designer” in a class of binary action contests with incomplete information about the abilities of the players. If the contest designer wants to incentivize the players to play in equilibrium a particular...

This paper analyzes the case of a principal who wants to provide an agent with proper incentives to explore a hypothesis that can be either true or false. The agent can shirk, thus never proving the hypothesis, or he can avail himself of a known technology to produce fake successes. This latter...

A universal type space of interdependent expected utility preference types is constructed from higher-order preference hierarchies describing (i) an agent's (unconditional) preferences over a lottery space; (ii) the agent's preference over Anscombe-Aumann acts conditional on the unconditional...

Italian Abstract: Come è stata modellata la pubblicità in economia? Essenzialmente la pubblicità è un modo di espandere la domanda. Nel caso di differenziazione orizzontale, la pubblicità può differenziare artificialmente un bene altrimenti omogeneo (pubblicità persuasiva) o rendere...

Consider the following "informational robustness" question: what can we say about the set of outcomes that may arise in equilibrium of a Bayesian game if players may observe some additional information? This set of outcomes will correspond to a solution concept that is weaker than equilibrium,...

We propose an incomplete information analogue of rationalizability. An action is said to be belief-free rationalizable if it survives the following iterated deletion process. At each stage, we delete actions for a type of a player that are not a best response to some conjecture that puts weight...

We study agents whose expected utility preferences are interdependent for informational or psychological reasons. We characterize when two types can be strategically distinguished in the sense that they are guaranteed to behave differently in some finite mechanism. We show that two types are...

This paper proposes a screening approach to explain why dating is associated with purchasing status products and conspicuous gift giving. A potential bride searching for a husband may seek to screen candidates whose income is only partially observable. Taking into account that she also bears...

The mechanism design literature assumes too much common knowledge of the environment among the players and planner. We relax this assumption by studying implementation on richer type spaces. We ask when ex post implementation is equivalent to interim (or Bayesian) implementation for all possible...