Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no...

When employers cannot tell whether a school truly has many good students or whether it is just giving easy grades, schools have an incentive to inflate grades to help their mediocre students. However schools also care about preserving the value of good grades for their good students. We...

Costly delay in negotiations can induce the negotiating parties to be more forthcoming with their information and improve the quality of the collective decision. Imposing a deadline may result in stalling, in which players at some point stop making concessions but switch back to conceding at the...

This paper considers a model of a rating agency with multiple clients, in which each client has a separate market that forms a belief about the quality of the client after the agency issues a rating. When the clients are rated separately (individual rating), the credibility of a good rating in...

In an assignment market with uncertainty regarding productive ability of participants, early contracting can occur as participants balance risk sharing and sorting efficiency. More promising agents may contract early with each other because insurance gains outweigh sorting inefficiency, whereas...

In markets for entry-level professionals, the insurance motive drives some participants to sign early contracts. The rush to early contracting can be self-fulfilling, as both its effect on expectations about demand-supply balance in the subsequent spot market and the effect on it from changes in...

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no...

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences. When members' preferences differ, the report submitted by any individual can not allow perfect...

We present a two-period model of the assignment market with uncertainty in the first period regarding productive characteristics of participants. This model is used to understand incentives toward early contracts or unraveling in labor markets for entry-level professionals. We study two...