The literature on central banking so far has provided explanations of why we observe independent central banks and why central banks are usually more conservative than governments. However, little is known about the interaction between the two institutions. Bridging the gap, we focus on the...

This paper analyzes intertemporal seller pricing and buyer purchasing behavior in a laboratory retail market with differential information. A seller posts one price each period that a buyer either accepts or rejects. Trade occurs over a sequence of "market periods" with a random termination...

This paper examines a class of signaling games with multi-dimensional private information to study how the prior, joint distribution of the private information variables affect a signal's effectiveness in revealing information about these variables. To illustrate the general problem investigated...

This paper investigates an extended version of Crawford-Sobel's (1982) communication game in which the principal can control the quality of the expert's information. We prove that the optimal quality of information is always bounded away from the full information and characterize the optimal...

This paper examines equilibrium and welfare in a tractable class of economies with externalities, strategic complementarity or substitutability, and incomplete information. In equilibrium, complementarity amplifies aggregate volatility by increasing the sensitivity of actions to public...

We consider an economy where trade is decentralized and agents have incomplete information with respect to the value of money. Agents' learning evolves from private experiences and we explore how the formation of prices interacts with learning. We show that multiple equilibria arise, and...

This paper investigates robust information transmission between a sender and a receiver in the Crawford and Sobel (1982) model. We characterize behavior that remains equilibrium behavior independently of the form of a small communication cost. Under standard conditions, we find that an...

We consider a standard persuasion problem in which the receiver’s action and the state of the world are both one-dimensional. Fully characterizing optimal signals when utilities are non-linear is a daunting task. Instead, we develop a general approach to understanding a key qualitative...

This paper studies whether dissemination of private, pre-decision signals about productivity is valuable to the principal when agents work sequentially and observe each other’s effort. The benefit of dissemination is that when productivity states are correlated, each agent’s signal is useful...

Fifty-six percent of the U.S. taxpaying population uses a paid tax preparer, but the effect of these tax preparation services on tax compliance is not well-understood. Although governments conceal the algorithms they use to determine which taxpayers to audit, tax preparation firms with large...