We analyze a legislative bargaining game over an ideological and a distributive issue. Legislators are privately informed about their ideological positions. Communication takes place before a proposal is offered and majority rule voting determines the outcome. We compare the outcome of the...

We introduce a "nestedness" relation for a general class of sender-receiver games and compare equilibrium properties, in particular the amount of information transmitted, across games that are nested. Roughly, game B is nested in game A if the players’s optimal actions are closer in game B. We...

This paper studies communication games in which the sender is possibly honest (who tells the truth) and the receiver is possibly naive (who follows the messages as if they were truthful) and the message space is finite. I establish the existence of a message-monotone equilibrium (in which the...

I study the welfare effects of an informative public signal in two sender-receiver games: in {A}, the sender reports after the arrival of the public signal; in {B}, the sender reports before the arrival of the public signal. In both games the receiver's equilibrium payoff is not increasing in...

Using a laboratory experiment, we study the evolution of economic networks in the context of fragmented social identity. We create societies in which members can initiate and delete links to others, and then earn payoffs from a public goods game played within their network. We manipulate whether...