We consider a job contest in which candidates go through interviews (cheap talk) and are subject to reference checks. We show how competitive pressure - increasing the ratio of "good" to "bad" type applicants - can lead to a vast increase in job interview lying and in some cases make bad hires...

In this paper, we provide an explanation for why committees may behave over-cautiously. A committee of experts must decide whether to approve or reject a proposed innovation on behalf of "society." Each expert's private signal is a noisy version of what the "state of the art science" would...

Many important decisions within public and private organizations are based on recommendations from expert committees and advisory boards. A notable example is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's advisory committees, which make recommendations on new drug applications. Previously the voting...

A manager/mechanism designer must allocate a set of money prizes ($1, $2, .., $n ) between n agents working in a team. The agents know the state i.e. who contributed most, second most, etc. The agents' preferences over prizes are state independent. We incorporate the possibility that the manager...

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'...

In this paper, we consider a committee of experts that decides whether to approve or reject a proposed innovation on behalf of society. In addition to a payoff linked to the adequateness of the committee's decision, each expert receives a disesteem payoff if he/she voted in favor of an ill-fated...

Many important decisions within public and private organizations are based on recommendations from expert committees and advisory boards. A notable example is the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's advisory committees, which make recommendations on new drug applications. Previously the voting...