Games with imperfect information often feature multiple equilibria, which depend on beliefs off the equilibrium path. Standard selection criteria such as passive beliefs, symmetric beliefs or wary beliefs rest on ad hoc restrictions on beliefs. We propose a new selection criterion that imposes...

We study Downsian competition in a Mirrleesian model of income taxation. The competing politicians may differ in competence. If politicians engage in vote-share maximization, the less competent politician's policy proposals are attractive to the minority of rich agents, whereas those of the...

Judges and juries frequently must decide, knowing that they do not know everything that would be relevant for deciding the case. The law uses two related institutions for enabling courts to nonetheless decide the case: the standard of proof, and the burden of proof. In this paper, we contrast a...

Despite a large theoretical and empirical literature on public goods and common-pool resources, a systematic comparison of these two types of social dilemmas is lacking. In fact, there is considerable confusion about these two types of dilemma situations. As a result, they are often treated...

Kolmogorov's extension theorem provides a natural mapping from the space of coherent hierarchies of an agent's first-order, second- order, etc. beliefs to the space of probability measures over the exogenous parameters and the other agents' belief hierarchies. Mertens and Zamir (1985) showed...

For a countable product of complete separable metric spaces with a topology induced by a uniform metric, the set of Borel probability measures coincides with the set of completions of probability measures on the product o-algebra. Whereas the product space with the uniform metric is...

This paper develops a strategic model of procrastination in which present-biased agents prefer to do an onerous task in the company of someone else. This turns their decision of when to do the task into a procrastination game { a dynamic coordination game between present-biased players. The...

We introduce intention-based social preferences into mechanism design. We explore information structures that dier with respect to what is commonly known about the weight that agents attach to reciprocal kindness. When the designer has no information on reciprocity types, implementability of an...

This paper studies collusion in one-shot auctions, where a buyer can bribe his competitors into lowering their bids. We modify the single-unit Vickrey auction to incite deviations from the designated-winner scenario and thus undermine collusion. The construction of mechanism does not require the...

The theoretical literature on collusion in auctions suggests that the first-price mechanism can deter the formation of bidding rings. In equilibrium, collusive negotiations are either successful or are avoided altogether, hence such analysis neglects the effects of failed collusion attempts. In...