This paper considers social contracts (or mechanisms) in negotiations with incomplete information in which an outside option is a probabilistic conflict and a peaceful agreement is ex ante efficient. Applications include partnership, labor-management bargaining, pretrial negotiations, and...

Financial analysts may have strategic incentives to herd or to anti-herd when issuing forecasts of firms' earnings. This paper develops and implements a new test to examine whether such incentives exist and to identify the form of strategic behavior. We use the equilibrium property of the...

We study forecast dispersion in a finite-player forecasting game modeled as an aggregate game with payoff externalities and dispersed information. In the game, each agent cares about being accurate as well as about the distance of his forecast from the average forecast; and with a finite number...

Offense-defense theory argues that wars are more likely in offense-dominant periods. I study how this claim can be challenged when it comes to making predictions about terrorism. To do so, I consider a model of continuous-time conflict between a status quo state and a terrorist, who develops...