While political correctness is a dominant norm in many public situations, we also observe behaviors that are apparently ''politically incorrect,'' often from professionals and experts. This paper examines the flip side of political correctness as analyzed in Morris (2001) to shed some light on...

In this paper we analyze a cheap talk model with a partially informed receiver. In clear contrast to the previous literature, we find that there is a case where the receiver's prior knowledge enhances the amount of information conveyed via cheap talk. The point of departure is our explicit focus...

Auctions are a popular and prevalent form of trading mechanism, despite the restriction that the seller cannot price-discriminate among potential buyers. To understand why this is the case, we consider an auction-like environment in which a seller with an indivisible object negotiates with two...

We consider a gtenure-clock problemh in which a principal may set a deadline by which she needs to evaluate an agent's ability and decides whether to promote him or not. We embed this problem in a continuous-time model with both hidden action and hidden information, where the principal must...

A group of individuals, with a potential conflict of interest, face a choice among alternatives. There is a network externality such that the chosen alternative yields value only if sufficiently many individuals get on board. Their preferences for each alternative and the benefit derived from a...

It is often touted that decisiveness is one of the most important qualities to be possessed by leaders, broadly defined. To see how and why decisiveness can be a valuable asset in organizations, we construct a model of strategic information transmission where: (i) a decision maker solicits...

This paper explores the consequences and implications of the "dual role of promotion" in an environment where a firm must simultaneously achieve two distinct goals -- assignment and incentive provision -- via the strategic use of promotions. We argue that the efficient promotion rule is...

This paper provides a simple autonomy-based model of human motivation in which a decision maker with divided selves must perform some task. The key presumption of the model is that the brain is not a unitary system which is equipped to achieve a single goal in a systematic manner; rather, it is...

In most firms, if not all, workers are divided asymmetrically in terms of authority and responsibility. In this paper, we view the asymmetric allocations of authority and responsibility as essential features of hierarchy and examine why hierarchies often prevail in organizations from that...

This paper examines the effectiveness of cheap talk when the receiver is imperfectly informed. We show that the receiver's prior knowledge becomes an impediment to efficient communication in a model with the discrete state space: in general, the more the receiver is informed, the less...