Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...

Can workers from social groups of comparable productivities obtain comparable employment opportunities in the long run? We model dynamic hiring and employer learning via a general Poisson multi-armed bandit framework. Breakdown environments that reveal on-the-job mistakes rather than successes...

We study social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model, emphasizing the trade-off between marginal innovation (combining existing technologies) and radical innovation (breaking new ground). We characterize both short-term and long-term dynamics of innovation, and the...

How does renegotiation affect contracts between a principal and an agent subject to persistent private information and moral hazard? This paper introduces a concept of renegotiation-proofness, which adapts to stochastic games the concepts of weak renegotiation-proofness and internal consistency...

This paper argues that, to be forward-looking in a logically consistent sense, a decision maker must take account of his overall well-being, not just his instantaneous utility, in all future periods. However, such a decision-maker is necessarily time inconsistent. The paper explores the...

In many economic applications involving comparisons of multivariate distributions, supermodularity of an objective function is a natural property for capturing a preference for greater interdependence. One multivariate distribution dominates another according to the supermodular stochastic...

A frequently heard explanation for the underdeveloped metro system in Rome is the following one: If we tried to build a new metro line, it would probably be stopped by archeological finds that are too valuable to destroy, so the investment would be wasted. This statement, which seems...

Cooperative concepts of renegotiation in repeated games have typically assumed that Paretoranked equilibria could not coexist within the same renegotiation-proof set. With explicit renegotiation, however, a proposal to move to a Pareto-superior equilibrium can be deterred by a different...