Truthtelling is often viewed as focal in direct mechanisms. We introduce two new notions of robust implementation based on the premise that society may be composed of "primitive'' agents who, whenever confronted with a strategy profile, anchor to truthtelling and make a limited number of...

This paper analyzes the optimal provision of incentives in a dynamic information acquisition process. In every period, the agent can acquire costly information that is relevant to the principal's decision. Each signal may or may not provide definitive evidence in favor of the good state. Neither...

We analyze the extent to which efficient trade is possible in an ongoing relationship between impatient agents with hidden valuations (i.i.d. over time), restricting attention to equilibria that satisfy ex post incentive constraints in each period. With ex ante budget balance, efficient trade...

This paper studies the full implementation in sequential information design (Doval and Ely (2020)) in which the designer can construct the extensive form as well as the information struc- ture. In this framework, I characterize the optimal outcome under full implementation when players and the...

This paper analyzes the optimal provision of incentives in a sequential testing context. In every period the agent can acquire costly information that is relevant to the principal's decision. Neither the agent's effort nor the realizations of his signals are observable. First, we assume that the...

We consider the problem of optimal information sharing in an unobservable single-server queue offering service at a fixed price to a Poisson arrival of delay-sensitive customers. The service provider observes the queue, and may share state information with arriving customers. The customers are...

People in inferior bargaining positions are often vaguer when they express their preferences. In this paper, we explain how power shapes clarity of communication. We analyze information transmission in a cheap talk bargaining game between an informed Sender and an uninformed Receiver. Our main...

In the past, many refinements have been proposed to select equilibria in cheap talk games. Usually, these refinements were motivated by a discussion of how rational agents would reason in some particular cheap talk games. In this paper, we propose a behavioral refinement and stability measure...

We consider a game played by a state sponsor of terrorism, a terrorist group, and the target of terrorist attacks. The sponsoring state wishes to see as much damage inflicted on the target of attack as possible, but wishes to avoid retaliation. To do so, his relationship with the terrorist group...

We study the effect of strengthening CACs in a debt rollover model of a sovereign debt crisis. Conditional on default, there are multiple equilibria: the impact of strengthening CACs depends critically on the prevailing equilibrium. For a subset of equilibria, (i) given a fixed number of...