A decisionmaker gets independent advice from two experts, who can be of two different types. Experts are risk-neutral and prefer certain policies irrespective of the state of nature, so to induce information-sharing the decisionmaker must reward truthful experts. I show that, in this...

In their pursuit of being re-elected, politicians might not choose high-quality policies but just conform to popular wisdom. The larger are the office spoils, and the more precise is an incumbent's knowledge of voter opinion, the more likely that she will resort to such populism. My main result...

Recent research on central bank governance has focused mainly on their monetary policy task. As the sub-prime loan market turmoil reminded us - central banks play a crucial role in financial markets not only in setting monetary policy, but also in ensuring their soundness and stability. In this...

We study the effects of unequal representation in the interest-group system on the degree of information transmission between a lobbyist and a policy-maker. Employing a dynamic cheap-talk model in which the lobbyist cares instrumentally about his reputation for truth telling, we show that the...

A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...

A uniform pricing rule may enable the communication of demand information from buyer to seller in situations where this would not have been possible if the seller could price discriminate. Importantly, such a rule can benefit both buyer and seller.