We argue that the intensity of competition within a group or organization can have an important influence on whether or not people cheat. To make this point we first work through a simple model of strategic misreporting in the workplace. For low and high levels of competition we show that, in...

In an experiment, a group of strangers was randomly divided in pairs to play a prisoners’ dilemma; this process was indefinitely repeated. Cooperation did not increase when subjects could send public messages amounting to binding promises of future play.

We model strategic mediation of the communication between an informed expert with a discrete type space and an uninformed decision maker. A strategic mediator can improve communication even when he is biased into the same direction as the expert.

I find in two classes of sender–receiver games that the receiver’s equilibrium payoff is not increasing in the informativeness of a public signal because the sender may transmit less information when the public signal is more informative.

We consider a cheap talk model with the sender’s exit option. We show that in the case of discrete action space, it can be the case that there exists an informative equilibrium if and only if the sender’s bias is sufficiently small or sufficiently large. The latter case is sharply...

We conduct a laboratory experiment and provide evidence of learning spillovers within and across equivalence classes of “structurally similar” games. These spillovers are inconsistent with existing theories of learning in games.

Do corrupt people self select themselves in professions where the scope of corruption is high? We conduct a corruption experiment with private sector job aspirants and aspirants of Indian bureaucracy. The game models embezzlement of resources in which “supervisors” evaluate the performance...

We test in a laboratory experiment the theoretical prediction that risk attitudes have a surprisingly small role in distorting reports from true belief distributions. We find evidence consistent with theory in our experiment.

I examine two dimensions of framing in public goods games: Contributing vs. Taking and Gains vs. Losses. I find decreased cooperation under the Taking frame, but not under the Loss frame. This framing effect is stronger for men than women.