How does lie detection constrain the potential for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a model of Bayesian persuasion in which the Receiver can detect lies with positive probability. We show that the Sender lies more when the lie detection probability increases. As...

When is it possible for one person to persuade another to change her action? We take a mechanism design approach to this question. Taking preferences and initial beliefs as given, we introduce the notion of a persuasion mechanism: a game between Sender and Receiver defined by an information...

Much literature on political behavior treats politicians as motivated by reelection, choosing actions to signal their types to voters. We identify two novel implications of models in which signalling incentives are important. First, because incumbents only care about clearing a reelection...

We propose a new game theoretic approach to modeling large elections that overcomes the "paradox of voting" in a costly voting framework, without reliance on the assumption of ad hoc preferences for voting. The key innovation that we propose is the adoption of a "smooth" policy rule under which...

We study how people think others update their beliefs upon encountering new evidence. We find that when two individuals share the same prior, one believes that new evidence cannot systematically shift the other's beliefs in either direction (Martingale property). When the two have different...

This is a paper in the ``economists ruin everything'' field. It considers whether Catch-22 situations can persist as an equilibrium phenomenon. Rather than being an arbitrary rule or a set of self-serving beliefs, the focus is on the preferences of Gatekeepers who choose to create such...

Global games of regime change -- that is, coordination games of incomplete information in which a status quo is abandoned once a sufficiently large fraction of agents attacks it -- have been used to study crises phenomena such as currency attacks, bank runs, debt crises, and political change. We...

This paper shows that when donors and recipients care about each other --two-sided altruism -- the presence of asymmetry of information about the donor's income leads very naturally to a signaling game. A donor who cares about the recipient's welfare has incentives to appear richer than he is...

We present a model of a financial market where some traders are "cursed" when choosing how much to invest in a risky asset, failing to fully take into account what prices convey about others' private information. Cursed traders put more weight on their private signals than rational traders. But...

We study information acquisition and dynamic withdrawal decisions when a spreading rumor exposes a solvent bank to a run. Uncertainty about the bank's liquidity and potential failure motivates depositors who hear the rumor to acquire additional noisy signals. Depositors with less informative...