We study the effects of preselection on an expert's incentive to give truthful advice. In a decision environment in which certain decisions yield more precise estimates about the expert's expertise, a mediocre expert's advice is biased. We show that this bias can be undone by the introduction of...

We experimentally investigate a finitely repeated public good game with varying partners. Within each period, participants are pairwise matched and contribute simultaneously. Participants are informed about contributions and each participant evaluates her partner's contribution. At the beginning...

Syndication, which is a joint realization of one project/one investment by several capital providers, is a long existing phenomenon that plays a central role in many financial market segments. Within this paper we develop a theoretical model focusing on the dynamic aspect of syndication, namely...

Can vanity do any good? It may seem obvious to answer this question in the negative, as economists have shown how reputational concerns lead agents e.g. to ignore valuable information, to herd, and to become overly risk averse. We explore how proud agents may be a social blessing. An agent may...

Which signals are important in gaining attention in science? For a group of 1,371 scientific articles published in 17 demography journals in the years 1990-1992 we track their influence and discern which signals are important in receiving citations. Three types of signals are examined: the...

When hiring an adviser (he), a policy maker (she) often faces the problem that she has incomplete information about his preferences. Some advisers are good, in the sense that their preferences are closely aligned to the policy maker's preferences, and some advisers are bad. Recently, some...

We develop and estimate a general equilibrium model in which monetary policy can deviate from active in.ation stabilization and agents face uncertainty about the nature of these deviations. When observing a deviation, agents conduct Bayesian learning to infer its likely duration. Under...

Die Handwerksordnung (HwO) ist die rechtliche Grundlage des handwerklichen Sektors in Deutschland. In Folge ihrer Novellierung im Jahr 2004 entfiel für die Hälfte der von der HwO regulierten Berufe die Meisterpflicht als Vorbedingung zur Unternehmensgründung. Während die...

We analyze delegation of a set of decisions over time by an informed principal to a potentially biased agent. Each period the principal observes a state of the world and sends a 'cheap-talk' message to the agent, who is privately informed about her bias. We focus on principal-optimal equilibria...

We analyze a repeated cheap-talk game in which the receiver is privately informed about the conflict of interest between herself and the sender and either the sender or the receiver controls the stakes involved in their relationship. We focus on payoff-dominant equilibria that satisfy a...