Robert Wilson criticizes applied game theory's reliance on common-knowledge assumptions. In reaction to Wilson's critique, the recent literature of mechanism design has adopted the goal of finding detail-free mechanisms in order to eliminate this reliance. In practice this has meant restricting...

Consider two agents who learn the value of an unknown parameter by observing a sequence of private signals. The signals are independent and identically distributed across time but not necessarily agents. Does it follow that the agents will commonly learn its value, i.e., that the true value of...

There are two opposite views regarding whether stronger protection of intellectual property rights (IPRs) will benefit or hurt the South. We provide a unification using a model of directed innovations with identical but non-homothetic preferences. For the South, a major benefit of protecting...

We model countersignaling (i.e., very high types refraining from signaling) arising from the tradeoff between persuasion and learning in a signaling game. We assume that the agent has imperfect private information regarding his/her productivity, which the signaling action provides additional...

This paper studies repeated moral hazard in teams. Agents' actions are observable to each other but not to the principal. For any given dynamic contract, agents always select their favorite subgame perfect equilibrium in the corresponding dynamic game. The optimal dynamic contract must take that...

In the mechanism design literature, collusion is often modelled as agents signing side contracts. This modelling approach is in turn implicitly justified by some unspecified repeated-interaction story. In this paper, we first second-guess what kind of repeated-interaction story these...