This paper studies organizations with autocratic decisionmaking, i.e., where superiors make the decisions and subordinates either defy or submit to the authority. Superiors differ in the degree to which they fear defiance. The superiors who need obedience most face a credibility problem, which,...

Informational spillovers induce agents to outwait each other's actions in order to make more-informed decisions. If waiting is costly, we expect the best-informed agent, who has the least to learn from other agents' decisions, to take the first action. I study the interplay between informational...

A firm must decide whether to launch a new product. A launch implies considerable fixed costs, so the firm would like to assess downstream demand before it decides. We study under which conditions a potential buyer would be willing to reveal his willingness to pay under different pricing...