The paper analyzes the role of the structure of communication - i.e. who is talking with whom - on the choice of messages, on their credibility and on actual play. We run an experiment in a three-player coordination game with Pareto ranked equilibria, where a pair of agents has a profitable...

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 reconsider the canonical model of price setting with menu costs by Ball and Romer (1990). Their original model exhibits multiple equilibria for nominal aggregate demand shocks of intermediate size. By abandoning Ball and Romer's (1990) assumption that demand shocks are common knowledge among...

We present a three-player game in which a proposer makes a suggestion on how to split $10 with a passive responder. The offer is accepted or rejected depending on the strategy pro le of a neutral third-party whose payoffs are independent from his decisions. If the offer is accepted the split...

We use a two-country model with a central bank maximizing union-wide welfare and two fiscal authorities minimizing comparable, but slightly different country-wide losses. We analyze the rivalry between the three authorities in seven static games. Comparing a homogeneous with a heterogeneous...

We investigate the matching algorithm used by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions (ZVS) in medicine and related subjects. This mechanism consists of three procedures based on final grades from school ("Abiturbestenverfahren", "Auswahlverfahren der Hochschulen") and on...

We implement a repeated version of the Barro-Gordon monetary policy game in the laboratory and ask whether reputation serves as a substitute for commitment, enabling the central bank to achieve the efficient Ramsey equilibrium and avoid the inefficient, time-inconsistent one-shot Nash...

This paper first develops a new approach, which is based on the Nelson-Siegel term structure factor-augmented model, to compute the VaR of bond portfolios. We then applied the model to examine whether information contained on macroeconomic variables and financial shocks can help to explain the...

In light of persistent in ation dispersion and rising debt levels in the EMU, this paper investigates the welfare implications of budget-neutral scal policies that counteract in ation di erentials. In a two-country DSGE model of a monetary union with traded and non-traded goods a national scal...

Given that well-being is a concave function of income, inequality is inefficient from a utilitarian perspective. This paper proposes a way to express the utilitarian benefit from redistributive reforms in terms of out- put, i.e. as a share of GDP. Three applications are presented: First, in nine...