{"title":"Persuasion with verifiable information","authors":"Maria Titova , Kun Zhang","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106102","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106102","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper studies a game in which an informed sender with state-independent preferences uses verifiable messages to convince a receiver to choose an action from a finite set. We characterize the equilibrium outcomes of the game and compare them with commitment outcomes in information design. We provide conditions under which a commitment outcome is an equilibrium outcome and identify environments in which the sender does not benefit from commitment power. Our findings offer insights into the interchangeability of verifiability and commitment in applied settings.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106102"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145474272","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Informational frictions in funding and credit markets","authors":"Michael Sockin","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106101","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106101","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>A key function of financial intermediaries is to borrow in financial markets and lend to firms. I show that this creates informational linkages between repo and corporate bond markets. My key result is improving transparency in either market may lower welfare even if funding liquidity improves. My model’s predictions are consistent with the bond and repo market dysfunction during the 2008 global financial and COVID-19 crises, and the impact of the introduction of TRACE on bond markets in 2002. Central to my findings is that bond prices serve as useful signals that minimize firm’s aggregate distress costs by coordinating their borrowing and intermediaries’ lending activities.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106101"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145424473","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Incomplete financial markets, the social cost of carbon and constrained efficient carbon pricing","authors":"Felix Kubler","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106105","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106105","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines constrained optimal carbon pricing in a general equilibrium model with incomplete asset markets. A carbon policy consists of state-dependent carbon taxes and a sharing rule for tax revenue recycling. The social cost of carbon (SCC) is defined as the present value of the future marginal costs of additional CO2 emissions, discounted at (personalized) prices. For the case of complete markets, we state simple, sufficient conditions that ensure that setting carbon taxes equal to the SCC results in a Pareto-efficient competitive equilibrium. When markets are incomplete, constrained Pareto-efficient carbon taxes generically differ from the SCC. To examine the potential quantitative importance of these differences, we consider an Aiyagari [1994]-style model with a climate change externality. We prove that (i) the SCC cannot be estimated from aggregate damage functions and market prices alone, and (ii) the deviations of constrained optimal carbon taxes from the SCC can be arbitrarily large.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106105"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145474218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"HANK on speed: Robust nonlinear solutions using automatic differentiation","authors":"Gregor Boehl","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106106","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106106","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>Building on automatic differentiation, I propose a robust and efficient solution method for perfect-foresight transition dynamics in heterogeneous agent models with many aggregate equations. Compared with existing methods, it allows to capture strong nonlinearities, including, e.g., occasionally binding constraints, and dynamics that deviate significantly from the steady state. A powerful and user friendly open-source reference implementation is provided, which efficiently computes nonlinear solutions to the canonical HANK model within seconds, including the transition dynamics of the full distribution. I challenge this method by studying a permanent shift in redistribution policy in a medium-scale two-asset HANK model featuring many aggregate frictions. The results indicate that, as firms seek to deplete their capital stock, the transition path is characterized by a prolonged deflationary episode, the severity of which depends on the interaction between nonlinear constraints, such as the interest rate lower bound and downward nominal wage rigidity.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106106"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145474271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ingela Alger , Jörgen W. Weibull , Laurent Lehmann
{"title":"Corrigendum to “Evolution of preferences in structured populations: Genes, guns, and culture” [Journal of Economic Theory 185 (2020) 104951]","authors":"Ingela Alger , Jörgen W. Weibull , Laurent Lehmann","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106110","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106110","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106110"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145623733","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mean-field approximation of forward-looking population dynamics","authors":"Ryota Iijima , Daisuke Oyama","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106079","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106079","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We study how the equilibrium dynamics of a continuum-population game approximate those of large finite-population games. New agents stochastically arrive to replace exiting ones and make irreversible action choices to maximize the expected discounted lifetime payoffs. The key assumption is that they only observe imperfect signals about the action distribution in the population. We first show that the stochastic process of the action distribution in the finite-population game is approximated by its mean-field dynamics as the population size becomes large, where the approximation precision is uniform across all equilibria. Based on this result, we then establish continuity properties of the equilibria at the large population limit. In particular, each agent becomes almost negligible, in the sense that in equilibrium, each agent's action is almost optimal against the (incorrect) belief that it has no impact on others' actions as presumed in the continuum-population case. Finally, for binary-action supermodular games, we show that when agents are patient, there is a unique equilibrium as observation noise becomes small while the population size becomes large. In this equilibrium, every agent chooses a risk-dominant action, and the population globally converges to the corresponding steady state.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106079"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145120487","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Bad reputation due to incompetent expert","authors":"Weicheng Min","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106080","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106080","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>This paper examines the impact of a recommender's career concerns on the long-term relationship with a consumer when the recommender has a private type in his expertise. An informed type's expertise is valuable for the consumer's ongoing purchasing decisions, whereas an uninformed type lacks such expertise and thus cannot mimic the informed type. I show that the <em>uninformed</em> type's reputation concerns never benefit the consumer and may lead to a complete market breakdown when they are sufficiently strong. Moreover, this “bad reputation” phenomenon arises even if the informed type is myopic and the consumer is long-lived. The analysis identifies the conditions under which this result holds and provides insights into the design of compensation schemes for recommenders.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106080"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145108579","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Larry Karp , Robert C. Schmidt , Leo Simon , Leanne Streekstra
{"title":"On the timing of moves in two-player games","authors":"Larry Karp , Robert C. Schmidt , Leo Simon , Leanne Streekstra","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106107","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106107","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We introduce a novel continuous-time framework for analyzing two-player games. Each player can move at most once, choosing an action along with its timing. We introduce assumptions that allow for a natural representation of such games, and establish results on the relation between discrete and continuous time. Unlike in Simon and Stinchcombe [1989], action sets are compact subsets of <span><math><msup><mi>R</mi><mi>n</mi></msup></math></span> (rather than finite). This substantially increases the scope for applications. For illustration, we analyze different variants of price competition with entry in continuous time. Our framework handles complexities such as discontinuous changes in prices, and allows us to predict the identity of the price leader with minimal calculation. We show that it depends on product differentiation and on the possibility to deter entry.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106107"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145528274","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Learning under ambiguity: An experimental investigation","authors":"M. Abdellaoui , B. Hill , E. Kemel , H. Maafi","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106093","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106093","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>We investigate learning in ambiguous situations where subjects bet on a winning event whose probability depends on an unknown proportion of winning chips in an urn. Varying the number of draws prior to choice allows us to “scan” ambiguity attitudes across differing amounts of information. By separately eliciting posterior beliefs in addition to matching probabilities, we disentangle the impact of learning on ambiguity attitude from its impact on beliefs, including divergences from Bayesian update. Both “raw data” and smooth ambiguity model-based analyses show that learning affects ambiguity attitude in the direction of ambiguity neutrality. Moreover, at small sample sizes, the impact of these changes on preferences is comparable to that of the divergence from Bayesian update.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106093"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145268739","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Auctions with tokens: Monetary policy as a mechanism design choice","authors":"Andrea Canidio","doi":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106095","DOIUrl":"10.1016/j.jet.2025.106095","url":null,"abstract":"<div><div>I study a repeated auction in which payments are made with a blockchain token created and initially owned by the auction designer. Unlike the “virtual money” previously examined in mechanism design, such tokens can be saved and traded outside the mechanism. I show that the present-discounted value of expected revenues equals that of a conventional dollar auction, but revenues accrue earlier and are less volatile. The optimal monetary policy burns the tokens used for payment, a practice common in blockchain-based protocols. I also show that the same outcome can be reproduced in a dollar auction if the auctioneer issues a suitable dollar-denominated security. This equivalence breaks down with moral hazard and contracting frictions: with severe contracting frictions the token auction dominates, whereas with mild contracting frictions the dollar auction combined with a dollar-denominated financial instrument is preferred.</div></div>","PeriodicalId":48393,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Economic Theory","volume":"230 ","pages":"Article 106095"},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2025-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145268737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}