We consider cheap talk by a biased expert comparing multiple issues, e.g., discussion of different spending proposals by an industry lobbyist, evaluation of different stocks by a sell-side analyst, or analysis of different topics by a biased newspaper. When the expert’s motives are sufficiently transparent, we find that cheap talk is credible and influential even when the expert strongly favors...

In this paper, we introduce a notion of epistemic equivalence between hierarchies of conditional beliefs and hierarchies of lexicographic beliefs, thus extending the standard equivalence results of Halpern (2010) and Brandenburger et al. (2007) to an interactive setting, and we show that there is a Borel surjective function, mapping each conditional belief hierarchy to its epistemically equival...

We study the problem of elicitation of subjective beliefs of an agent when the beliefs are ambiguous (the set of beliefs is a non-singleton set) and the agent’s preference exhibits ambiguity aversion; in particular, as represented by α-maxmin preferences. We construct a direct revelation mechanism such that truthful reporting of beliefs is the agent’s unique best response. The mechanism uses kn...

This paper examines the nature of partisan preferences on a range of issue scales. It compares preferences in a period of strong ideological focus, in the late eighties and early nineties, with preferences in 2000 and 2001 – a period of weak ideological focus. Where partisan preferences were formerly polarised, they are now more consensual. I argue that once positional issues now resemble valen...

BACKGROUND Guidelines in paediatric oncology encourage health care providers to share relevant information with young patients and parents to enable their active participation in decision making. It is not clear to what extent this mirrors patients' and parents' preferences. This study investigated communication preferences of childhood cancer patients, parents, and survivors of childhood cance...

We examine the formation and evolution of corporate risk culture, defined as the preferences towards risk and uncertainty shared by a firm’s leaders, as well as its effect on corporate policies. Commonality in risk attitudes inside the firm arises through the selection of managers and directors with similar attitudes towards risk and uncertainty. Selection also leads to persistence in corporate...

Most important decisions in organizations are made by groups of managers or experts. Methods for aggregating preferences and reconciling differences are needed in case decision makers have different viewpoints. Human judgments, including preferences are often vague and cannot be estimated in exact numerical values. This paper proposes a new method under the linguistic framework for heterogeneou...

This article offers a brief comparative look at American and British jurisprudential pending selection reforms, and argues that American states could improve their appointive systems by incorporating modern personnel recruitment and hiring practices. To restore public confidence in the courts, people must believe that judges exercise legitimate authority, undistorted by personal or partisan pre...

We propose a theory of strategic voting in multi-winner elections with approval balloting: A fixed number  of candidates are to be elected; each voter votes for as many candidates as she wants; the  candidates with the most votes are elected. We assume that voter preferences are separable and that there exists a tiny probability that any vote might be misrecorded. Best responses involve votin...

In “The Logic of Campaigning”, Dean and Parikh consider a candidate making campaign statements to appeal to the voters. They model these statements as Boolean formulas over variables that represent stances on the issues, and study optimal candidate strategies under three proposed models of voter preferences based on the assignments that satisfy these formulas. We prove that voter utility evalua...