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We study a T‐period contracting problem where performance evaluations are subjective and private. We find that the principal should punish the agent for performing poorly in the future even when the evaluations were good in the past; at the same time, the agent should be given opportunities to make up for poor evaluations in the past with better performance in the future. Optimal incentives are thus asymmetric. Conditional on the same number of good evaluations, an agent whose performance improves over time should be better rewarded than one whose performance deteriorates.

We present a model in which the media provide voters with information that is tainted by their own preferences, and derive an equilibrium in which media endorsements influence voting behavior. Competition for media endorsement causes political parties to adopt more centrist policies, which benefits all voters. Mass media which are more sensitive to changes in policies and which are less biased lead to greater policy convergence toward the median voter's ideal point. The presence of multiple media outlets also helps promote electoral competition.

SummaryEvidence has accumulated to suggest that the mean IQs of Orientals in the United States and in the countries of the Pacific Basin are higher than those of Whites (Caucasoids) in the United States and Britain. This paper presents evidence from IQ tests on 4858 6-year-old Chinese children in Hong Kong. On the Coloured Progressive Matrices these children obtained a mean IQ of 116. Samples from Australia, Czechoslovakia, Germany, Romania, the UK and the US obtain IQs in the range 95–102. It is suggested that these results pose difficulties for the environmentalist explanations commonly advanced to explain the low mean IQs obtained by some ethnic minorities in the United States.

The number of Internet news media outlets has skyrocketed in recent years. We analyze the effects of media proliferation on electoral outcomes assuming voters may choose news that is too partisan, from an informational perspective, i.e., engage in partisan selective exposure. We find that if voters who prefer highly partisan news-either because they are truly ideologically extreme, or due to a tendency towards excessive selective exposure-are politically "important," then proliferation is socially beneficial, as it makes these voters more likely to obtain informative news. Otherwise, proliferation still protects against very poor electoral outcomes that can occur when the number of outlets is small and the only media options are highly partisan. Our model's overall implication is thus that, surprisingly, proliferation is socially beneficial regardless of the degree of selective exposure. Adapted from the source document.

Many committees—juries, political task forces, etc.—spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting rules affect outcomes. We also contrast static information collection, as in classical hypothesis testing, with dynamic collection, as in sequential hypothesis testing. Several insights emerge. Static information collection is excessive, and sequential information collection is non-stationary, producing declining decision accuracies over time. Furthermore, groups using majority rule yield especially hasty and inaccurate decisions. Nonetheless, sequential information collection is welfare enhancing relative to static collection, particularly when unanimous rules are used.