We provide an explanation for why committees may behave over-cautiously. A committee of experts makes a decision on a proposed innovation on behalf of 'society'. Each expert's signal about the innovation's quality is generated by the available evidence and the best practices of the experts'...

We examine the informal exchange of favors in societies such that any two individuals interact too infrequently to sustain exchange, but such that the social pressure of the possible loss of multiple relationships can sustain exchange. Patterns of exchange that are locally enforceable and...

We prove that for any equilibrium of a (Bayesian) game, and any sequence of perturbations of that game, there exists a corresponding sequence of ex-ante ε-equilibria converging to the given equilibrium of the original game. We strengthen the conclusion to show that the approaching equilibria...

A set of voters consults experts before voting over two alternatives. Experts observe private signals about the values of the alternatives and can reveal their information or conceal it, but cannot lie. We examine how disclosure and voting vary with preference biases, signal precision, and the...

This paper shows the existence of monotone pure-strategy equilibrium in auctions with both common-value bidders and private-value ones. In equilibrium, the common-value bidders bid less aggressively when there are more private-value bidders. Further, resale is discussed as an application.

We examine how buyers’ behaviors, sellers’ profits and the social welfare (the total surplus of all sellers and buyers) vary with the order of sellers in sequential auctions where sellers have different reservation values. First, when reserve prices are exogenously set to be sellers’...