We study minority representation in the workplace when employers engage in optimal sequential search and minorities convey noisier signals of ability than mainstream job candidates. The greater signal noise makes it harder for minorities to change employers' prior beliefs. When employers are selective, this leads to minority underrepresentation in the workplace. Diversity improves when the cost of interviewing, the average skill level of candidates, or the opportunity cost of not hiring increases. Reducing the cost of firing also increases minority representation. When employers are sufficiently unselective, the rigidity of employers' beliefs leads to overrepresentation of minorities.

We study a Condorcet jury model where voters are driven by instrumental and expressive motives. We show that arbitrarily small amounts of expressive motives significantly affect equilibrium behavior and the optimal size of voting bodies. Enlarging voting bodies always reduces accuracy over some region. Unless conflict between expressive and instrumental preferences is very low, information does not aggregate in the limit, and large voting bodies perform no better than a coin flip in selecting the correct outcome. Thus, even when adding informed voters is costless, smaller voting bodies often produce better decisions.

Committees always seem to have chairmen, and monetary policy committees (MPCs) are no exception. But some MPCs are dominated by their chairmen, who are definitely first among unequals, while others come closer to making decisions by true consensus or even by major? ity vote. Does it matter? Is strong leadership an important ingredient in good monetary policy? With no real-world observations on leaderless

In many settings, including venture capital financing, mergers and acquisitions, and lease competition, the structure of the contracts over which firms compete differs. Furthermore, the structure of the contract affects the future incentives of the firm to engage in value-creating activities by potentially diluting effort or investment incentives. We study, both theoretically and in the lab, the performance of debt and equity auctions in the presence of both private information and hidden effort. We show that the revenues to sellers in debt and equity auctions differ systematically depending on the returns to entrepreneurial effort. Using a controlled laboratory experiments we test the model's predictions and find strong support for the theory.

In settings ranging from office suite software to online auctions, casual empiricism suggests a strong tendency for markets where platforms compete to tip to a single dominant player. But which platform will prevail? One might hope that the better platform will be selected. Theory, however, offers no such comfort. Standard models suggest that tipping to any platform—even an inferior one—comprises an equilibrium. Paul A. David (1985) suggests that getting stuck in a bad equilibrium is not merely a theoretical possibility, but a good description of what happened in the typewriter keyboard market. He argues that the QWERTY arrangement prevailed (and continues to prevail) despite its inferiority to the DVORAK arrangement. The essence of David’s argument is that, by virtue of its head start in the market, users expected QWERTY to prevail and these expectations were selffulfilling. As a consequence, the superior platform, DVORAK, was never adopted. The idea that self-fulfilling expectations can lead an inferior platform to triumph in the face of better alternatives has now become standard in the economics literature and features prominently in many textbooks (see, for instance, Luis M. B. Cabral, 2000). Yet, despite the long passage of time since David’s piece was first published, the datedness of the examples illustrating this idea is striking. Most textbooks, including Cabral’s, are content to focus on QWERTY as well as the competition between Betamax and VHS some thirty years ago. We thank Dylan Minor and Xingtian Zhu for excellent research assistance. We gratefully

We study a model in which voters choose between two candidates on the basis of both ideology and competence. While the ideology of the candidates is commonly known, voters are imperfectly informed about competence. Voter preferences, however, are such that ideology alone determines voting. When voting is compulsory, the candidate of the majority ideology prevails, and this may not be optimal from a social perspective. However, when voting is voluntary and costly, we show that turnout adjusts endogenously so that the outcome of a large election is always first-best.

We study information transmission via polling. A policymaker polls constituents, who differ in their information and ideology, to determine policy. Full revelation is an equilibrium in a poll with a small sample, but not with a large one. In large polls, full information aggregation can arise in an equilibrium where constituents endogenously sort themselves into centrists, who respond truthfully, and extremists, who do not. We find polling statistics that ignore strategic behavior yield biased estimators and mischaracterize the poll's margin of error. We construct estimators that account for strategic behavior. Finally, we compare polls and elections.

We examine the equilibrium interaction between a market for price information (controlled by a gatekeeper) and the homogenous product market it serves. The gatekeeper charges fees to firms that advertise prices on its Internet site and to consumers who access the list of advertised prices. Gatekeeper profits are maximized in an equilibrium where (a) the product market exhibits price dispersion; (b) access fees are sufficiently low that all consumers subscribe; (c) advertising fees exceed socially optimal levels, thus inducing partial firm participation; and (d) advertised prices are below unadvertised prices. Introducing the market for information has ambiguous social welfare effects.

We use field and natural experiments in online auctions to study the revenue effect of varying the level and disclosure of shipping charges. Our main findings are (1) disclosure affects revenues—for low shipping charges, a seller is better off disclosing; and (2) increasing shipping charges boosts revenues when these charges are hidden. These results are not explained by changes in the number of bidders.