No abstract

Learning by observing the past decisions of others can help explain some otherwise puzzling phenomena about human behavior. For example, why do people tend to converge on similar behavior? Why is mass behavior prone to error and fads? The authors argue that the theory of observational learning, and particularly of informational cascades, has much to offer economics, business strategy, political science, and the study of criminal behavior.

No abstract

No abstract

We characterize dominant-strategy incentive compatibility with multidimensional types. A deterministic social choice function is dominant-strategy incentive compatible if and only if it is weakly monotone (W-Mon). The W-Mon requirement is the following: If changing one agent's type (while keeping the types of other agents fixed) changes the outcome under the social choice function, then the resulting difference in utilities of the new and original outcomes evaluated at the new type of this agent must be no less than this difference in utilities evaluated at the original type of this agent.

No abstract

No abstract

The market for Treasury securities attracted considerable attention recently, after alleged infringements by Salomon Brothers. Several questions have been raised about the best way of selling U.S. government debt. One issue is whether altering the auction format would yield greater revenues for the Treasury. Another related question is how susceptible the existing mechanism for selling Treasury securities is to manipulation by buyers. In this paper, we describe what economists' analyses of auctions imply about the market for Treasury securities.