This paper introduces a family of definitions of deceptive behavior. The definitions provide different ways to describe the notion that deceptive behavior misleads a player by inducing inaccurate beliefs. For each definition of deception, I identify a class of preferences under which behavior is deceptive if and only if it harms any player with preferences in the class. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D02; C90; C72. Keywords: communication, damage, deception.

This paper demonstrates how to extend a standard model of strategic communication to distinguish between referential messages that identify states and conative messages that describe actions. It assumes that there are messages that have conventional meanings and makes different assumptions about the connection between these conventional meanings and preferences. With conventional meaning and connections, differences between messages that describe states and messages that describe actions may arise in equilibrium. The nature of the relationships depends on the structure of the strategic interaction (common- versus opposed-interests). Costly lying leads to the use of referential messages in games where players have common objectives but to the use of conative messages in games where players have opposed objectives. When interests are common, players use and interpret conventional messages in the conventional way. When interests are opposed, typically there will not be an equilibrium in which players always use and interpret conventional messages in the conventional way.

A manager has access to expert advisers. The manager selects at most one project and can implement it only if one expert provides support. The game in which the manager consults experts simultaneously typically has multiple equilibria, including one in which at least one expert supports the manager's favorite project. Only one outcome, the experts' most preferred equilibrium outcome, survives iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies. We show that no sequential procedure can perform better for the manager than the experts' most preferred equilibrium and exhibit a sequential protocol that does as well. (JEL C72, D23, D82)

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The American Economic Association awarded Parag Pathak the 2018 John Bates Clark Medal for his research on the impacts of educational policies. Both the theory and the empirical research take the constraints facing administrators seriously. As a result, Parag’s research led directly to educational reforms in many large US cities and abroad. The leading example is Parag (and co-authors’) research on school assignment mechanisms that led many school districts to institute fairer and more efficient procedures for allocating students to schools. The institutional detail Parag learned in working on the assignment problem led to innovative empirical work on the impacts of different types of schools, most notably of charters, which was suggestive of the characteristics of both successful schools and of the types of students who gained from being enrolled in them. Using the data generated by the new assignment rules, his recent work provides complete frameworks for the quantitative analysis of the benefits of different assignment mechanisms and has measured those benefits in New York high schools.

This article proposes definitions of lying, deception, and damage in strategic settings. Lying depends on the existence of accepted meanings for messages but does not require a model of how the audience responds to messages. Deception does require a model of how the audience interprets messages but does not directly refer to consequences. Damage requires consideration of the consequences of messages. Lies need not be deceptive. Deception does not require lying. Lying and deception are compatible with equilibrium. I give conditions under which deception must be damaging.

We study an environment in which a decision maker has access to several expert advisers. The experts all have access to an identical set of facts. The decision maker’s utility is increasing in the number of facts that the experts reveal. The experts have (potentially) different preferences. The game in which experts simultaneously disclose information typically has multiple equilibria. When multiple equilibria exist, the decision maker’s favorite equilibrium fails to survive iterative deletion of weakly dominated strategies. We characterize the set of equilibria that survive iterative deletion of weakly dominated strategies. In a leading special case, only one outcome survives iterative deletion of weakly dominated strategies. It is the most preferred equilibrium from the perspective of the experts. We study the outcomes that can arise when the decision maker can consult the experts sequentially. We demonstrate that if the decision maker can select the order of consultations, can consult experts multiple times, and can commit to ending the consultation process, then in leading cases he can induce the same disclosure as with simultaneous disclosure. Sequential disclosure may perform worse than simultaneous disclosure from the perspective of the decision maker when it is not possible to consult experts multiple times or if commitment is not feasible.

We conduct an analysis of the “efficiency gap” using tools from economic theory and find serious flaws in the measure. In particular, we show that the efficiency gap contains an peculiar form of cost benefit analysis which is hard to defend, that the recommendations for the use of the efficiency gap treat large states differently from small states without apparent justification, that its use can increase political polarization, and ignores the possibility of uncertainty in the outcome of elections.

This paper extends Milgrom and Robert's treatment of supermodular games in two ways.It points out that their main characterization result holds under a weaker assumption.It refines the arguments to provide bounds on the set of strategies that survive iterated deletion of weakly dominated strategies.I derive the bounds by iterating the best-response correspondence.I give conditions under which they are independent of the order of deletion of dominated strategies.The results have implications for equilibrium selection and dynamic stability in games.

“The Guidance of an Enterprise Economy” by Martin Shubik and Eric Smith is an ambitious attempt to study the functioning of large economies using ideas from physics, biology, chemistry, and game theory. This essay presents an overview of the book’s contributions. ∗Department of Economics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093, U.S.A. E-mail: jsobel@ucsd.edu.

This paper studies lying. An agent randomly picks a number from a known distribution. She can then report any number and receive a monetary payoff based only on her report. The paper presents a model of lying costs that generates hypotheses regarding behavior. In an experiment, we find that the highest fraction of lies is from reporting the maximal outcome, but some participants do not make the maximal lie. More participants lie partially when the experimenter cannot observe their outcomes than when the experimenter can verify the observed outcome. Partial lying increases when the prior probability of the highest outcome decreases.

Consider a finite two-player game with one round of communication. Restrict players to a subset of “monotonic” strategies. The paper justifies this restriction. The paper provides sufficient conditions under which the strategies of the restricted game that survive iterative deletion of weakly dominated strategies favor the agent who can communicate.

This paper extends Milgrom and Robert’s treatment of supermodular games in two ways. It points out that their main characterization result holds under a weaker assumption. It refines the arguments to provide bounds on the set of strategies that survive iterative deletion of weakly dominated strategies. I derive the bounds by iterating the best-response correspondence. I give conditions under which they are independent of the order of deletion of dominated strategies. The results have implications for equilibrium selection and dynamic stability in games. The paper generalizes the Interval-Dominance Condition of Quah and Strulovici. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D81.

This paper studies organizations in which participants have common preferences but communication is costly. In this model, use words to describe similar information, but need not use precise words for frequent events and vague words for unusual ones. The model identifies a source of communication failure across units. It provides an argument for giving the best-informed agents decision-making authority. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: D23, D83, L23;