Governments often pursue procyclical fiscal policies, even though they reduce voter welfare. Is this because voters actually prefer procyclical policies? The analysis in this paper exploits the first individual-level evidence from an original survey of 12,000 respondents in 8 countries across...

We assess the usefulness of stochastic redistribution among a continuum of risk-averse agents with quasilinear utilities in labor. Agents differ according to their consumption tastes, which remain private information. We identify circumstances where stochastic redistribution is socially...

We provide a framework for analyzing bilateral mergers when there is two-sided asymmetric information about firms’ types. We show that there is always a "no-merger" equilibrium where firms do not consent to a merger, irrespective of their type. There may also be a "cut-off" equilibrium if the...

This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents’ production technologies display learning effects and agents’ rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show...

We analyze a Bayesian merger game under two-sided asymmetric information about firm types. We show that the standard prediction of the lemons market model–if any, only low-type firms are traded–is likely to be misleading: Merger returns, i.e. the difference between pre- and post-merger...

In a continuous-time setting, we study the design of a dynamic contract between a government and a private entity, wherein the latter commits to pay the government in return for the exclusive right to sell a service by operating a public facility. Private revenues are modelled as depending on...

This paper investigates the design of incentives in a dynamic adverse selection framework when agents’ production technologies display learning effects and agents’ rate of learning is private knowledge. In a simple two-period model with full commitment available to the principal, we show...

We study the bilateral exchange of information in the context of linear quadratic games. An information structure is here represented by a non directed network, whose nodes are agents and whose links represent sharing agreements. We first study the equilibrium use of information in any given...

We consider a game of information transmission, with one informed decision maker gathering information from one or more informed senders. Private information is (conditionally) correlated across players, and communication is cheap talk. For the one sender case, we show that correlation...

The paper addresses the mechanism design problem of eliciting truthful information from a committee of informed experts who collude in their information disclosure strategies. It is shown that under fairly general conditions full information disclosure is possible if and only if the induced...