In this paper we study nationalizations in the oil industry around the world in 1960-2002. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that governments are more likely to nationalize when oil prices are high and when political institutions are weak. We consider a simple dynamic model of the...

We present a unified duality approach to Bayesian persuasion. The optimal dual variable, interpreted as a price function on the state space, is shown to be a supergradient of the concave closure of the objective function at the prior belief. Strong duality holds when the objective function is...

We study a communication game between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver with repeated interactions and voluntary transfers. Transfers motivate the receiver’s decision-making and signal the sender’s information. Although full separation can always be supported in equilibrium,...

Growing evidence suggests that many social and economic networks are scale free in that their degree distribution has a power-law tail. A common explanation for this phenomenon is a random network formation process with preferential attachment. For a general version of such a process, we develop...

A sender chooses ex ante how her information will be disclosed to a privately informed receiver who then takes one of two actions. The sender wishes to maximize the probability that the receiver takes the desired action. The sender faces an ex ante quantity-quality tradeoff: sending positive...

In this article, we study nationalizations in the oil industry around the world during 1960--2006. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that governments are more likely to nationalize when oil prices are high and when political institutions are weak. We consider a simple dynamic model of...

This article studies a principal-agent problem where the only commitment for the uninformed principal is to restrict the set of decisions she makes following a report by the informed agent. We show that an ex ante optimal equilibrium for the principal corresponds to a finite partition of the...

In this paper we study nationalizations in the oil industry around the world in 1960-2002. We show, both theoretically and empirically, that governments are more likely to nationalize when oil prices are high and when political institutions are weak. We consider a simple dynamic model of the...

Physicians prescribing drugs for patients with schizophrenia and related conditions are remarkably concentrated in their choice among antipsychotic drugs. In 2007 the single antipsychotic drug prescribed by a physician accounted for 66% of all antipsychotic prescriptions written by that...

This paper studies the price-setting problem of a monopoly that in each time period has the option of failing to deliver its good after receiving payment. The monopoly may be induced to deliver the good if consumers expect that the monopoly will not deliver in the future if it does not deliver...