consensus building how to persuade a group many decisions in private and public organizations are made by groups the paper explores strategies that the sponsor of a proposal may employ to convince a qualified majority of group members to approve the proposal adopting a mechanism design approach to communication it emphasizes the need to distill information selectively to key members of the group and to engineer persuasion cascades in which members who are brought on board sway the opinion of others the paper unveils the factors such as the extent of congruence among group members and between them and the sponsor and the size and governance of the group that condition the sponsor s ability to maneuver and get his project approved

environmental quality competition and eco labeling abstract a three stage game of investment environmental quality provision and price competition is developed to study the impact of green technology investment eco labeling in a duopoly model of vertical product differentiation the firms incentives to invest in green technologies depend on their relative cost structure when firms are identical with respect to fixed costs both firms will always invest but if one firm is more efficient in investing then the other firm may or may not invest depending on the level of unit cost of investment quality competition will be tighter when the low quality firm is more efficient and looser when the high quality firm is more efficient in investing socially optimal investment for both firms is always positive but lower than in the duopoly solution in the absence of environmental externalities the quality dispersion chosen by profit maximizing firms may be too high or too low while environmental externalities increase the possibility low quality dispersion that is too low within the market solution finally and importantly ecolabeling can be used as a means of reducing excessive investment and increasing environmental quality that is too low

exploiting ergodicity in forecasts of corporate profitability abstract theory suggests that competition tends to equalize profit rates through the process of capital reallocation and numerous studies have confirmed that profit rates are indeed persistent and mean reverting recent empirical evidence further shows that fluctuations in the profitability of surviving corporations are well approximated by a stationary laplace distribution here we show that a parsimonious diffusion process of corporate profitability that accounts for all three features of the data achieves better out of sample forecasting performance across different time horizons than previously suggested time series and cross sectional models as a consequence of replicating the empirical distribution of profit rates the model prescribes a particular strength or speed for the mean reversion of all returns which leads to superior forecasts of individual time series when we exploit information from the cross sectional collection of firms the new model should appeal to managers analysts investors and other groups of corporate stakeholders who are interested in accurate forecasts of profitability to the extent that mean reversion in profitability is the source of predictable variation in earnings our approach can also be used in forecasts of earnings and is thus useful for firm valuation

eco labelling competition and environment endogenization of labelling criteria this paper suggests a modelling of the labelling procedure consistent with empirical observations that allows the endogenous calculation of labelling criteria the authority in charge of the labelling program chooses the level of labelling criteria so as to maximise the social surplus anticipating competition between firms in environmental qualities and prices while accounting simply for the informational role of labels this model allows to understand observed behavior such as firms ignorance of a label resistance support or indifference of firms to the labelling program and the decision of the authority not to set up a label

are high growth firms one hit wonders evidence from sweden most firms do not grow and a small number of high growth firms seem to create most new jobs these firms have therefore received increasing attention among policymakers the question is whether high growth tends to persist we investigate this question using firm level data from sweden during 1997 2008 we find that high growth firms had declining growth rates in the previous 3 year period and their probability of repeating high growth rates was very low thus these are essentially one hit wonders and it is doubtful whether policymakers can improve economic outcomes by targeting them

corporate growth and industrial structures some evidence from the italian manufacturing industry this work analyses the properties of corporate growth in a large longitudinal sample of italian manufacturing firms in particular it focuses on the statistical properties of growth rates and on the influence of proxies for relative efficiency upon relative growth in line with previous work the emergence of fat tails in growth rate distributions and the idiosyncratic nature of autocorrelation coefficients confirm the existence of a structure in the growth process richer than the one normally assumed by the gibrat law hypothesis and suggest the presence of firm specific drivers of growth at the same time there is a remarkable puzzle concerning the absence of any negative relationship between size and growth variance and only weak influences of relative efficiencies upon growth dynamics

information aggregation rationality and the condorcet jury theorem the condorcet jury theorem states that majorities are more likely than any single individual to select the better of two alternatives when there exists uncertainty about which of the two alternatives is in fact preferred most extant proofs of this theorem implicitly make the behavioral assumption that individuals vote sincerely in the collective decision making a seemingly innocuous assumption given that individuals are taken to possess a common preference for selecting the better alternative however in the model analyzed here we find that sincere behavior by all individuals is not rational even when individuals have such a common preference in particular sincere voting does not constitute a nash equilibrium a satisfactory rational choice foundation for the claim that majorities invariably do better than individuals therefore has yet to be derived

minority voting rights can maximize majority welfare i use condorcet s information aggregation model to show that sometimes the best possible decision procedure for the majority allows the minority to enforce its favored outcome even when overruled by a majority special voting power gives the minority an incentive to participate meaningfully and more participation means more information is aggregated which makes the majority better off this result can be understood as a mathematical corroboration of lani guinier s arguments that voting procedures can be designed to encourage minority participation benefitting everyone

optimal voting schemes with costly information acquisition a group of individuals with identical preferences must make a decision under uncertainty about which decision is best before the decision is made each agent can privately acquire a costly and imperfect signal we discuss how to design a mechanism for eliciting and aggregating the collected information so as to maximize ex ante social welfare we first show that of all mechanisms a sequential one is optimal and works as follows at random one agent at a time is selected to acquire information and report the resulting signal agents are informed of neither their position in the sequence nor of other reports acquiring information when called upon and reporting truthfully is an equilibrium we next characterize the ex ante optimal scheme among all ex post efficient mechanisms in this mechanism a decision is made when the precision of the posterior exceeds a cut off that decreases with each additional report the restriction to ex post efficiency is shown to be without loss when the available signals are sufficiently imprecise on the other hand ex post efficient mechanisms are shown to be suboptimal when the cost of information acquisition is sufficiently small

asymmetric information and legislative rules some amendments we reexamine the major tenets of the informational theory of legislative rules focusing on the informational efficiency of rules with varying degrees of restrictiveness when committees are heterogeneous full efficiency is attainable under the unrestrictive open rule as well as the somewhat restrictive modified rule in contrast the restrictive closed rule always leads to inefficiencies when committees are homogeneous the situation is different all equilibria are inefficient regardless of legislative rules but the closed rule leads to greater informational efficiency than does the open rule furthermore the efficiency gains under the closed rule more than offset distributional losses regardless of the degree of preference divergence we also examine the incentives provided by the different rules for information acquisition and committee specialization

does classical competition explain the statistical features of firm growth abstract we propose a statistical equilibrium model where the tendency for competition to equalize profit rates results in an exponential power or subbotin distribution the model supports and extends recent evidence on the laplace distribution of firm growth rates

a model of expertise we study a model in which perfectly informed experts offer advice to a decision maker whose actions affect the welfare of all experts are biased and thus may wish to pull the decision maker in different directions and to different degrees when the decision maker consults only a single expert the expert withholds substantial information from the decision maker we ask whether this situation is improved by having the decision maker sequentially consult two experts we first show that there is no perfect bayesian equilibrium in which full revelation occurs when both experts are biased in the same direction it is never beneficial to consult both in contrast when experts are biased in opposite directions it is always beneficial to consult both indeed in this case full revelation may be induced in an extended debate by introducing the possibility of rebuttal

in defense of unanimous jury verdicts mistrials communication and strategic voting the requirement of unanimous jury verdicts in criminal trials is widely believed to reduce the likelihood of convicting the innocent this belief depends largely upon the assumption that jurors will vote nonstrategically based on their impression of the trial evidence recent literature however has questioned this assumption and feddersen and pesendorfer propose a model in which it is never a nash equilibrium for jurors to vote nonstrategically under unanimity rule and equilibrium behavior produces higher probabilities of both convicting the innocent and acquitting the guilty under unanimity rule than under numerous alternatives i extend this work by incorporating two additional features of actual jury procedure the possibility of mistrial and communication among jurors under each circumstance i demonstrate that nonstrategic voting is a nash equilibrium under fairly general conditions and that unanimity performs better than any alternative rule in minimizing probability of trial error and maximizing expected utility

opinions as incentives we study costs and benefits of differences of opinion between an adviser and a decision maker even when they share the same underlying preferences over decisions a difference of opinion about payoff relevant information leads to strategic information acquisition and transmission a decision maker faces a fundamental trade off a greater difference of opinion increases an adviser s incentives to acquire information but exacerbates the strategic disclosure of any information that is acquired nevertheless when choosing from a rich pool of opinion types it is optimal for a decision maker to select an adviser with some difference of opinion centralization of authority is essential to harness these incentive gains since delegation to the adviser can discourage effort

business fluctuations in a behavioral switching model gridlock effects and credit crunch phenomena in financial networks abstract in this paper we characterize the evolution over time of a credit network in the most general terms as a system of interacting banks and firms operating in a three sector economy with goods credit and interbank market credit connections change over time via an evolving fitness measure depending from lenders supply of liquidity and borrowers demand of credit moreover an endogenous learning mechanism allows agents to switch between a loyal or a shopping around strategy according to their degree of satisfaction the crucial question we investigate is how financial bubbles and credit crunch phenomena emerge from the implemented mechanism

are output growth rate distributions fat tailed some evidence from oecd countries this work explores some distributional properties of aggregate output growth rate time series we show that in the majority of oecd countries output growth rate distributions are well approximated by symmetric exponential power densities with tails much fatter than those of a gaussian fat tails robustly emerge in output growth rates independently of i the way we measure aggregate output ii the family of densities employed in the estimation iii the length of time lags used to compute growth rates we also show that fat tails still characterize output growth rate distributions even after one washes away outliers autocorrelation and heteroscedasticity

the impact of classes of innovators on technology financial fragility and economic growth in this article we study innovation processes and technological change in an agent based model by including a behavioral switching among heterogeneous innovative firms the model is able to replicate via simulations well known industrial dynamic and growth type stylized facts the main original element of the model is that firms are allowed to endogenously change among three different classes namely single innovators collaborative innovators and imitators moreover our analysis focuses on the impact of these three innovation categories on micro meso and macro aggregates we find that collaborative companies are those having the highest positive impact on the economic system furthermore we have paid particular attention to the role of credit market in promoting smart growth for this purpose we analyze the role of banks as sources of external funds for innovative entrepreneurs our results suggest a trade off between short term profit maximization and long term efficiency which prevents banks to foster investment in r d and technological progress the model is then used to study the effect that different innovation policies have on macroeconomic performance

why are distributions of firm growth rates tent shaped abstract recent empirical analyses on different datasets have revealed a common exponential behavior in the shape of the probability density of the corporate growth rates we present new evidence on this topic from the italian manufacturing industry and propose a very simple mechanism that under rather general assumptions provides a robust explanation for the observed regularities

do firms share the same functional form of their growth rate distribution a statistical test abstract we propose a hypothesis testing procedure to investigate whether the same growth rate distribution is shared by all the firms in a balanced panel or more generally whether they share the same functional form for this distribution without necessarily sharing the same parameters we apply the test to panels of us and european union publicly quoted manufacturing firms both at the sectoral and at the subsectoral naics level we consider the following null hypotheses about the growth rate distribution of the individual firms i an unknown shape common to all firms with all the firms sharing also the same parameters or with the firm variance related to its firm size through a scaling relationship and ii several functional shapes described by the subbotin family of distributions our empirical results indicate that firms do not have a common shape of the growth rate distribution at the sectorial naics level whereas firms may typically be described by the same shape of the distribution at the subsectorial level even if the specific shape may not be the same for different subsectors

us consumers willingness to pay for green electricity abstract we analyze us consumers demand for environmental attributes of deregulated residential electricity services using results from a survey designed to elicit consumers willingness to pay for such attributes and using results from a hedonic analysis of actual price premiums charged for green electricity in several deregulated markets survey results suggest that many population segments are willing to pay for decreased air emissions even if there is no alteration in fuel source furthermore several groups are willing to pay significantly more when emissions reductions stem from increased reliance upon renewable fuels the hedonic analysis suggests that several product features not considered in the survey help explain real price premiums including fuel mix from newly created renewable generation capacity green e certification brand name and state of offer while survey and hedonic results are not easily compared due to limitations of the survey both point to similar values for key environmental attributes though the survey results are likely to overstate actual willingness to pay in sum the results suggest that consumer driven purchases can in part support the future of renewable generation capacity in the united states though reliance upon other policy alternatives may be needed if energy prices spike

explaining the distribution of firm growth rates empirical analyses on aggregated datasets have revealed a common exponential behavior in the shape of the probability density of corporate growth rates we present clear cut evidence on this topic using disaggregated data we explain the observed regularities proposing a model in which firms ability to take up new business opportunities increases with the number of opportunities already exploited a theoretical result is presented for the limiting case in which the number of firms and opportunities go to infinity moreover using simulations we show that even in a small industry the agreement with asymptotic results is almost complete

elections with privately informed parties and voters this paper studies a situation in which parties are betterinformed than voters about the optimal policies for voters weshow that voters are able to infer the parties information byobserving their electoral positions even if parties have policypreferences which differ substantially from the median voter s unlike previous work that reach opposite conclusions we assumethat voters have some private information of their own if theinformation available to voters is biased parties attempts toinfluence voters beliefs will result in less than fullconvergence even if parties know with certainty the optimalpolicy for the median voter

the financial accelerator in an evolving credit network we model a credit network characterized by credit relationships connecting i downstream d and upstream u firms and ii firms and banks the net worth of d firms is the driver of fluctuations the production of d firms and of their suppliers u firms in fact is constrained by the availability of internal finance proxied by net worth to the d firms the structure of credit interlinkages changes over time due to an endogeneous process of partner selection which leads to the polarization of the network at the aggregate level the distribution of growth rates exhibits negative skewness and excess kurtosis when a shock hits the macroeconomy or a significant group of agents in the credit network a bankruptcy avalanche can follow if agents leverage is critically high in a nutshell we want to explore the properties of a network based financial accelerator

conflicts and common interests in committees committees improve decisions by pooling members independent information but promote manipulation obfuscation and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences committee decision procedures transform continuous data into ordered ranks through voting this coarsens the transmission of information but controls strategic manipulations and allows some degree of information sharing each member becomes more cautious in casting the crucial vote than when he alone makes the decision based on own information increased quality of one member s information results in his casting the crucial vote more often committees make better decisions for members than does delegation

costly participation and heterogeneous preferences in informational committees informational committees are groups of people who are designated to gather information this article develops a simple model of committee size based on costly participation and preference heterogeneity in a setting in which the information structure and policy preferences are both represented by normal random variables i characterize an equilibrium under the mean decision rule and derive the optimal committee size i show that when effort costs are sufficiently high preference heterogeneity can provide members additional incentives to gather information and thus the optimal committee size and the principal s expected payoff can increase in the heterogeneity of committee members policy preferences

committee design with endogenous information this paper is concerned with the arrangements for collective decision making in a world where agents must be motivated to acquire information the analysis identifies some basic forces shaping the design of panels of decision makers referees managers jurors etc in situations where decision makers are useful only in so far as they expend some effort to gain information about the alternatives at hand these situations are common one being the refereeing process where an editor requires the opinions of a number of experts who must read the paper acquire information in order to give an opinion as to publication analogously in committees which screen applicants to a programme the committee members must gain information about the applicant s qualifications and likelihood of success in order to evaluate whether to admit him her finally in trial juries it is important that jurors pay attention to the evidence in order to make an informed judgement 1 we focus on environments where information is a public good in the sense that the social benefits of one decision maker acquiring information exceed the private benefits a good mechanism in this environment must not only aggregate information efficiently but also induce the decision makers to acquire information we analyse the design of voting mechanisms our problem is to choose two parameters which determine both the incentive to acquire information and the efficiency with which information is aggregated the first parameter is the size of the decision making unit the number of committee members the second is the plurality required to overturn the status quo the voting rule our main result is this a voting rule that requires a large plurality in the extreme unanimity to upset the status quo can be optimal only if the information available to each committee member is sufficiently accurate when individual information is noisy the drawback

firm growth and laplace distribution the importance of large jumps abstract recent empirical studies have shown that firm growth rate distribution is not gaussian but closely follows a laplace distribution this robust feature of the growth rate distribution challenges existing models based on gibrat s model because it predicts a gaussian distribution first we analyze more than 100 000 japanese firms and empirically show that the laplace shape can be observed for the japanese firms then by using the theory of stochastic processes we theoretically show that the absence of jumps causes the discrepancy between gibrat s model and the laplace shape in particular based on the laplace shape and the law of proportionate effect we show that the firm growth process is a jump process in other words firm growth cannot be explained by the consequence of many small shocks but is determined by a few large jumps the widely observed laplace distribution reflects this jump property of firm growth dynamics

large electorates and decisive minorities there are many instances in which even in a democracy the political preferences held by a minority of the electorate are reflected in political outcomes it is shown that for a simple two alternative election environment characterized by costly voting and private information when the expected population is very large the alternative preferred by more expected zealous voters who have either large stakes in the outcome of the election or small costs of participating wins with high probability in any equilibrium even if the expected proportion of the entire electorate that shares that preference is arbitrarily small this is an undersirable outcome under either of two natural but very different normative criteria

continuous decisions by a committee median versus average mechanisms abstract a group of strategic agents with diverse private information and interdependent preferences has to take a continuous collective decision i study the design of the decision making procedure from the viewpoint of a utilitarian social planner for uniformly distributed information the implementation of the average report as decision dominates the implementation of the median report when the set of admissible reports is optimally designed this is true for any number of agents and for any degree of interdependence the result extends to a general class of distributions when the number of agents is large

convergence results for unanimous voting abstract this paper derives a necessary condition for unanimous voting to converge to the perfect information outcome when voters are only imperfectly informed about the alternatives under some continuity assumptions the condition is also sufficient for the existence of a sequence of equilibria that exhibits convergence the requirement is equivalent to that found by milgrom 1979 econometrica47 679 688 for information aggregation in single prize auctions an example illustrates that convergence may be reasonably fast for small committees however if voters have common preferences unanimity is not the optimal voting rule unanimity rule makes sense only as a way to ensure minority views are respected journal of economic literature classification numbers d72 d82 d44

using conjoint analysis to derive estimates of compensating variation abstract we use several approaches to derive estimates of hicksian compensating variation from conjoint ratings data the different estimation approaches produced mixed results with respect to consistency with utility theory statistical significance of key variables magnitude of welfare estimates and confidence bounds on welfare estimates these findings suggest conjoint analyses are not a panacea for the problems being debated regarding contingent valuation and travel cost methodologies and conjoint questions appear to share many of the advantages and disadvantages associated with dichotomous choice contingent valuation questions

innovation and corporate growth in the evolution of the drug industry abstract this work studies the processes of growth of the worlds top 150 pharmaceutical firms on the grounds of an original database which also allows disaggregate analysis at the level of single therapeutical classes and chemical entities our findings show that the industry whose long term evolution is driven by innovation imitation and permanent creation of new markets displays i fat tails in the distribution of growth shocks present at all levels of aggregation with relatively rare big spurs of growth ii a significant autocorrelation of growth rates iii a fall of variance of growth rates with size entirely dependent on corporate diversification patterns in turn plausibly shaped by the competence scope of each firm and iv different lifecycles of diverse types of products and persistent forms of heterogeneity across firms in terms of innovative output which however do not not seem to affect comparative growth performances

reconciling quantile autoregressions of firm size and variance size scaling the aim of this paper is to understand what economic mechanisms may cause the law of proportionate effect to break down for fast growing and shrinking firms recent evidence has highlighted that the first order coefficients of quantile auto regression of firm size decline across quantiles our theoretical results show that negative variance size scaling is sufficient to yield a decline in quantile auto regression coefficients if firm log size is laplace distributed conditional on size one period ahead however it is sufficient only for declining auto regression coefficients for fast growing firms under asymmetric laplace conditional log size if skewness is decreasing with size in other words if the growth of large firms is less dispersed and more left skewed size is a disadvantage for the growth of fast growers but not necessarily an advantage for fast decliners thus size related determinants of negative growth skewness such as diseconomies of growth market power and managerial attention issues impact on how the lpe is violated using data on dutch manufacturing companies from the business register of enterprises observed between 1994 and 2004 our empirical estimates of quantile regression models confirm the evidence of declining quantile regression coefficients for small medium firms 20 199 employees mainly in the right most quantiles and for the same subsample we find that growth rates variance and skewness are decreasing with size the theoretical propositions of the paper are thus corroborated

firm size and firm growth rate distributions the case of denmark there has been a recent renewed interest in the study of firm size distributions and firm growth rate distributions gibrat s law assumes firm growth rates are independent and identically distributed and that size is determined by a firstorder integrated process leaving the size distribution log normal this article analyzes these distribution patterns in an empirical context questioning the foundation of this model in a cross section analysis of four industries using danish data we show that the foundation and the outcome of gibrat s law are empirically far fetched in particular significant deviations from normality are found

do liquidity constraints matter in explaining firm size and growth some evidence from the italian manufacturing industry the paper investigates whether liquidity constraints affect firm size and growth dynamics using a large longitudinal sample of italian manufacturing firms we run standard panel data gibrat regressions suitably expanded to take into account liquidity constraints proxied by cash flow scaled by firm sales moreover we characterize the statistical properties of fi rms size growth age and scaled cashflow distributions pooled data show that i liquidity constraints engender a negative statistically significant effect on growth once one controls for size ii smaller firms grow more and experience more volatile growth patterns after controlling for liquidity constraints iii the stronger liquidity constraints the more size negatively affects firm growth we find that pooled size distributions depart from log normality and growth rates are well approximated by fat tailed tent shaped laplace densities we also study the evolution of growth size distributions over time our exercises suggest that the strong negative impact of liquidity constraints on firm growth which was present in the pooled sample becomes ambiguous when one disaggregates across years finally firms who were young and strongly liquidity constrained at the beginning of the sample period grew persistently more than those who were old and weakly liquidity constrained

private vs public regulation political economy of the international environment minimum standards set by a world environmental organization weo and ngo labelling are promoted as alternative approaches to international environmental protection we explore the potential inter play between these two approaches when the weo is subject to pressure from producers we find that if weo and ngo schemes are mutually exclusive then the existence of an ngo alternative increases industry resistance to weo proposals and this may reduce welfare if however the schemes are run in parallel existence of the ngo lessens producer opposition to weo activities this allows the weo to be bolder in its proposals which is good for welfare

on the existence of persistently outperforming firms this study analyses persistence in growth rates for a data set of manufacturing firms of all sizes previous quantile autoregressions of firm growth rates show that extreme growth events are likely to be negatively correlated over time thus questioning the existence of persistent outperformers by supplementing the quantile regression analyses with transition probability matrices our study shows that bouncing firms coexist with persistent outperformers this result is shown to be robust for all size classes as well as for the exclusion of firms who experienced acquisitions or spin offs

turnover activity in wealth portfolios we examine several subsets of the wealthiest individuals in the us and the uk that are compiled by forbes magazine and the sunday times since these are named subsets we can calculate the returns to wealth portfolios and calibrate a statistical equilibrium model of wealth distribution that accounts for the power law of wealth and the asymmetric laplace distribution of portfolio returns the model provides a relative measure of turnover activity that indicates how often changes in the composition of the wealthiest portfolios occur finally we investigate trends in equality mobility and turnover activity

natural oligopolies a vertical differentiation model this article contains a more complete characterization of conditions under which vertically differentiated markets are or are not natural oligopolies than has been found previously in the literature specifically previous results on markets in which firms have cost functions with constant returns are incomplete these results are expanded moreover results are provided for markets with firms having increasing or decreasing marginal cost functions

meetings with costly participation we study a collective decision making process in which people interested in an issue may participate at a cost in a meeting and the resulting decision is a compromise among the participants preferences we show that the equilibrium number of participants is small and their positions are extreme and when the compromise is the median the outcome is likely to be random the model and its equilibria are consistent with evidence on the procedures and outcomes of us regulatory hearings jel d7 h0 l5

abstention ideology and information acquisition we consider an election in which each voter can collect information of different precision voters have asymmetric information and preferences that vary both in terms of ideology and intensity in contrast to all other models of voting with endogenous information in equilibrium voters collect information of different qualities we show that information and abstention are not necessarily negatively correlated some voters are more likely to abstain the more informed they are we also discuss the manner in which incentives to acquire information are non monotonic in terms of both ideology and the level of intensity

relying on the information of interested parties we investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decisionmaker by providing verifiable information elicits all relevant information we find that if the decisionmaker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the relevant variables and about the preferences of the interested party or parties competition may be unnecessary to achieve this result if the decisionmaker is unsophisticated or not well informed competition is not generally sufficient if the interested parties interests are sufficiently opposed however or if the decisionmaker is seeking to advance the parties welfare then competition can reduce or even eliminate the decisionmaker s need for prior knowledge about the relevant variables and for strategic sophistication in other settings only the combination of competition among information providers and a sophisticated skepticism is sufficient to allow effective decisionmaking

environmental labeling and incomplete consumer information in laboratory markets abstract survey evidence suggests that consumers care about the environment and are willing to pay a higher price for a product that generates less environmental harm we induce buyer preferences over quality in a laboratory posted offer market to study sellers incentives to offer products of differing quality buyers are unaware of the product quality before purchase as is often the case for goods with differing environmental quality we first document the market failure that arises from incomplete information when no signaling or reputations are possible we then study various treatments that could remedy this failure seller reputations and unverified cheap talk signals sometimes increase the number of higher valued green goods the only reliable way to improve product quality in the experiment however is to use a third party that charges a fee to certify product quality claims

learning in equilibrium models of arbitration this paper analyzes strategic communication in equilibrium models of conventional and final offer interest arbitration both models emphasize the role of learning by the arbitrator from the parties offers about the state of the employment relationship which is known to the parties but not to the arbitrator in both models the arbitrators equilibrium behavior is identical to the reduced form decision rule typically assumed in the empirical literature the paper thereby provides a structural interpretation for the existing empirical work the paper also represents progress towards a complete theory of arbitration because it satisfies three conditions that will be required of any such theory first the models predictions match the existing empirical evidence second the models describe equilibrium behavior and third the models are built on a common set of assumptions about preferences information and commitment the paper therefore not only provides an equilibrium foundation for the intuition that the arbitrator might learn from the parties offers but also uses the idea of learning to develop a unified analytical treatment of the two major forms of interest arbitration this abstract was borrowed from another version of this item