This paper extends the Romer-Rosenthal [1978, 1979] model of monopoly agenda control to an environment where only the agenda setter knows with certainty the outcome associated with a failed proposal. The presence of this asymmetric information implies that any "take-it-or-leave-it" proposal may provide information crucial to the decision calculus of the voters, a fact which an optimal proposal strategy will incorporate. The equilibrium behavior of the agenda setter and voters is characterized and contrasted with that in the complete information environment, and a number of empirical predictions concerning the nature of elections with monopoly controlled agendas are derived.

In a recent paper on behavior in experimental securities markets, Plott and Sunder ( 1982) concluded that the rational expectations (RE) model was superior to the traditional prior information (Pl) model in predicting equilibrium prices and holdings. In particular, given a market with one commodity, three possible states of the world, and three groups of trader "types," each with differing valuations on the commodity per state, initially uninformed traders were able to infer the underlying state from the current market price and act accordingly. In a related paper, Friedman, Harrison, and Salmon (1984) observed that, given the existence of a futures market, the RE model outperformed the PI model in multiperiod, single-commodity markets as well. One source of potential misinterpretation, however, comes from the fact that, although one-half of the traders of each type were informed of the true state at the beginning of each period in Plott and Sunder (1982) and one-third of the traders of each type in Friedman, Harrison, and Salmon (1984), the same traders were informed in almost every period. In a more recent paper, Plott and Sunder (1983) constructed markets where all traders received partial information (i.e., given possible states X, Y, and Z, a trader's private information would be either "not X" or "not Y" if the state were Z), yet the combinations of traders receiving a certain message in any period were determined randomly.

The Theorem of Gittins and Jones (1974) is, perhaps, the single most powerful result in the literature on Bandit problems. This result establishes that in independent-armed Bandit problems with geometric discounting over an infinite horizon, all optimal strategies may be obtained by solving a family of simple optimal stopping problems that associate with each arm an index known as the dynamic allocation index or, more popularly, as the Gittins index. Importantly, the Gittins index of an arm depends solely on the characteristics of that arm and the rate of discounting, and is otherwise completely independent of the problem under consideration. These features simplify significantly the task of characterizing optimal strategies in this class of problems.

This paper studies the class of denumerable-armed (i.e. finite- or countably infinitearmed) bandit problems with independent arms and geometric discounting over an infinite horizon, in which each arm generates rewards according to one of a finite number of distributions, or "types." The number of types in the support of an arm, as also the types themselves, are allowed to vary across the arms. We derive certain continuity and curvature properties of the dynamic allocation (or Gittins) index of Gittins and Jones (1974), and provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which the Gittins-Jones result identifying all optimal strategies for finite-armed bandits may be extended to infinite-armed bandits. We then establish our central result: at each point in time, the arm selected by an optimal strategy will, with strictly positive probability, remain an optimal selection forever. More specifically, for every such arm, there exists (at least) one type of that arm such that, when conditioned on that type being the arm's "true" type, the arm will survive forever and continuously with nonzero probability. When the reward distributions of an arm satisfy the monotone likelihood ratio property (MLRP), the survival prospects of an arm improve when conditioned on types generating higher expected rewards; however, we show how this need not be the case in the absence of MLRP. Implications of these results are derived for the theories of job search and matching, as well as other applications of the bandit paradigm.

This paper studies the sequential equilibria of signaling games. It introduces a new solution concept, divine equilibrium, that refines the set of sequential equilibria by requiring that off-the-equilibrium-path beliefs satisfy an additional restriction. This restriction rules out implausible sequential equilibria in many examples. We show that divine equilibria exist by demonstrating that a sequential equilibrium that fails to be divine cannot be in a stable component. However, the stable component of signaling games is typically smaller than the set of divine equilibria. We demonstrate this fact through examples. We also present a characterization of the stable equilibria in generic signaling games.

The paper reports on an experimental investigation of four methods of allocating public goods. The two basic processes studied are direct contribution and a public goods auction process. Both of these processes are studied with and without an additional unanimity feature. The results suggest that the auction process outperforms direct contribution. The effect of unanimity is to decrease the efficiency of both processes. Much of the paper is focused on an analysis of these results.