| Most of the received literature on asymmetric information has focused on the study of situations in which the underlying uncertainty is one-dimensional. In the first two chapters of this dissertation I explore how multidimensionality may change two classical problems of asymmetric information: ‘cheap talk’ and ‘moral hazard in teams’. In the first essay, I show that, contrary to the unidimensional case, with more than one dimension full transmission of information in all states of nature is typically possible in a cheap talk game, provided a simple and intuitive condition is satisfied. What really matters in transmission of information is the local behavior senders' indifference curves at the ideal points of the receiver, not the proximity of players' ideal point as in the unidimensional case. In the second essay I show that in a problem of ‘moral hazard in teams’, when output is at least two dimensional (i.e. the firm produces two goods, for example), efficiency can be achieved for a generic production function, even if this is smooth and continuous, and for any number of agents. The classical result by Holmstrom [1982], therefore, does not generalize to vector valued production functions.; The last chapter is an essay in ‘behavioral economics’. In particular, it is the study of how joining a group and committing to observe other agents' actions may mitigate or aggravate the inefficiency of the choice of an agent with a problem of dynamic inconsistency. |
