A group of rational individuals with common interest need to select one of two outcomes. The optimal decision depends on whether certain premises or pieces of evidence are established as being true, and each member receives a noisy signal of the truth value of the relevant premises. Should the...

Most insurance companies publish few data on the occurrence and detection of insurance fraud. This stands in contrast to the previous literature on costly state verification, which has shown that it is optimal to commit to an auditing strategy. The credible announcement of thoroughly auditing...

We consider the dynamics of reasoning by general rules (theories) and by specific cases (analogies). When an agent faces an exogenous process, we show that, under mild conditions, if reality happens to be simple, the agent will converge to adopt a theory and discard analogical thinking. If,...

We study a dynamic coordination process in which agents are uncertain about the actions of their fellow agents, and anticipate strategically relevant information. Because of the uncertainty and learning, (ir)reversibility of actions has important strategic consequences. We find that the...

Economic models describe individuals by underlying characteristics, such as the degree to which they like music, have sympathy, want success, need recognition, etc. In reality, such characteristics change through experiences: taste for Mozart changes through attending concerts, sympathy through...

A decision maker (DM) considers the acquisition of a multi-attribute object with uncertain qualities which can be discovered at a cost. DM's problem is to decide how much to invest in the discovery and whether to adopt or discard based on partial information. We characterize the solution in some...

We show that in multi-sender communication games where senders imperfectly observe the state, if the state space is large enough, then there can exist equilibria arbitrarily close to full revelation of the state as the noise in the senders' observations gets small. In the case of replacement...

Recent field evidence suggests a positive link between overconfidence and innovative activities. In this paper we argue that the connection between overconfidence and innovation is more complex than the previous literature suggests. In particular, we show theoretically and experimentally that...

We study first- and second-order subjective expectations (beliefs) in strategic decision-making. We elicit probabilistically both first- and second-order beliefs and apply the method to a Hide-and-Seek experiment. We study the relationship between choice and beliefs in terms of whether observed...

In this paper we study market environments where information is costly to acquire and is also useful to potential competitors. Agents may sell, or buy, reports over the information acquired and choose their trades in the market on the basis of what they learnt. Reports are unverifiable – cheap...