A receiver wants to learn multidimensional information from a sender, and she has the capacity to verify just one dimension. The sender's payoff depends on the belief he induces, via an exogenously given monotone function. We show that by using a randomized verification strategy, the receiver can learn the sender's information fully in many cases. We characterize exactly when it is possible to do so. In particular, when the exogenous payoff function is submodular, we can explicitly describe a full‐learning mechanism; when it is (strictly) supermodular, full learning is not possible. In leading cases where full learning is possible, it can be attained using an indirect mechanism in which the sender chooses the probability of verifying each dimension.

We survey recent theoretical and empirical literature on political economics of non-democracies. Nondemocratic regimes face multiple challenges to their rule, both internal, such as palace coups or breakdown of their support coalition, and external, such as mass protests or revolutions. We analyze strategic decisions made by dictators from the standpoint of maximizing the chances of regime survival in the light of these challenges, and show how it explains multiple common patterns, from hiring political loyalists to positions that require competence, to restricting media freedom at the cost of sacrificing bureaucratic efficiency, to running propaganda campaigns, organizing election fraud, purging opponents and associates, and repressing citizens.

This comment corrects two results in the 2006 Econometrica paper by Amador, Werning, and Angeletos (AWA), that features a model in which individuals face a trade-off between flexibility and commitment. First, in contrast to Proposition 1 in AWA, we show that money-burning can be part of the ex ante optimal contract when there are two states. Second, in contrast to Proposition 2 in AWA, we show that money-burning can be imposed at the top (in the highest liquidity shock state), even when there is a continuum of states. We provide corrected versions of the above results. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

We model and test two school-based peer cultures: one that stigmatizes effort and one that rewards ability. The model shows that either may reduce participation in educational activities when peers can observe participation and performance. We design a field experiment that allows us to test for, and differentiate between, these two concerns. We find that peer pressure reduces takeup of an SAT prep package virtually identically across two very different high school settings. However, the effects arise from very distinct mechanisms: a desire to hide effort in one setting and a desire to hide low ability in the other.

We study the formation of a ruling coalition in non-democratic societies where institutions do not enable political commitments. Each individual is endowed with a level of political power. The ruling coalition consists of a subset of the individuals in the society and decides the distribution of resources. A ruling coalition needs to contain enough powerful members to win against any alternative coalition that may challenge it, and it needs to be self-enforcing, in the sense that none of its subcoalitions should be able to secede and become the new ruling coalition. We present both an axiomatic approach that captures these notions and determines a (generically) unique ruling coalition and the analysis of a dynamic game of coalition formation that encompasses these ideas. We establish that the subgame-perfect equilibria of the coalition formation game coincide with the set of ruling coalitions resulting from the axiomatic approach. A key insight of our analysis is that a coalition is made self-enforcing by the failure of its winning subcoalitions to be self-enforcing. This is most simply illustrated by the following example: with “majority rule”, two-person coalitions are generically not self-enforcing and consequently, three-person coalitions are self-enforcing (unless one player is disproportionately powerful). We also characterize the structure of ruling coalitions. For example, we determine the conditions under which ruling coalitions are robust to small changes in the distribution of power and when they are fragile. We also show that when the distribution of power across individuals is relatively equal and there is majoritarian voting, only certain sizes of coalitions (e.g. with majority rule, coalitions of size 1, 3, 7, 15, etc.) can be the ruling coalition.

An influential thesis often associated with de Tocqueville views social mobility as a bulwark of democracy: when members of a social group expect to join the ranks of other social groups in the near future, they should have less reason to exclude these other groups from the political process. In this article, we investigate this hypothesis using a dynamic model of political economy. As well as formalizing this argument, our model demonstrates its limits, elucidating a robust theoretical force making democracy less stable in societies with high social mobility: when the median voter expects to move up (respectively down), she would prefer to give less voice to poorer (respectively richer) social groups. Our theoretical analysis shows that in the presence of social mobility, the political preferences of an individual depend on the potentially conflicting preferences of her “future selves,” and that the evolution of institutions is determined through the implicit interaction between occupants of the same social niche at different points in time.

When voters fear that politicians may be influenced or corrupted by the rich elite, signals of integrity are valuable. As a consequence, an honest politician seeking reelection chooses “populist” policies—that is, policies to the left of the median voter—as a way of signaling that he is not beholden to the interests of the right. Politicians that are influenced by right-wing special interests respond by choosing moderate or even left-of-center policies. This populist bias of policy is greater when the value of remaining in office is higher for the politician; when there is greater polarization between the policy preferences of the median voter and right-wing special interests; when politicians are perceived as more likely to be corrupt; when there is an intermediate amount of noise in the information that voters receive; when politicians are more forward-looking; and when there is greater uncertainty about the type of the incumbent. We also show that soft term limits may exacerbate, rather than reduce, the populist bias of policies.

It is often argued that additional constraints on redistribution such as granting veto power to more players in society better protects property from expropriation. We use a model of multilateral bargaining to demonstrate that this intuition may be flawed. Increasing the number of veto players or raising the supermajority requirement for redistribution may reduce protection on the equilibrium path. The reason is the existence of two distinct mechanisms of property protection. One is formal constraints that allow individuals or groups to block any redistribution that is not in their favor. The other occurs in equilibrium where players without such powers protect each other from redistribution. Players without formal veto power anticipate that the expropriation of other similar players will ultimately hurt them and thus combine their influence to prevent redistributions. In a stable allocation, the society exhibits a “class” structure with class members having equal wealth and strategically protecting each other from redistribution.

Social norms, usually persistent, can change quickly when new public information arrives, such as a surprising election outcome. People may become more inclined to express views or take actions previously perceived as stigmatized and may judge others less negatively for doing so. We examine this possibility using two experiments. We first show via revealed preference experiments that Donald Trump’s rise in popularity and eventual victory increased individuals’ willingness to publicly express xenophobic views. We then show that individuals are sanctioned less negatively if they publicly expressed a xenophobic view in an environment where that view is more popular.

In dynamic collective decision making, current decisions determine the future distribution of political power and influence future decisions. We develop a general framework to study this class of problems. Under acyclicity, we characterize dynamically stable states as functions of the initial state and obtain two general insights. First, a social arrangement is made stable by the instability of alternative arrangements that are preferred by sufficiently powerful groups. Second, efficiency-enhancing changes may be resisted because of further changes they will engender. We use this framework to analyze dynamics of political rights in a society with different types of extremist views.