Three Essays on Incomplete Information in Politics

This dissertation begins with the observation that politics is often conducted in environments where there is incomplete information. In these environments, agents' behavior can reveal important information. But understanding this, agents may distort or alter their behavior, which has important ramifications for politics. In this dissertation, consisting of two solo-authored papers and one co-authored paper, I explore how incomplete information affects politics in a range of settings.

The first essay in this dissertation studies how incomplete information affects a policymaker's incentives to engage in the reform of an inherited status quo. At the core of this paper is a familiar logic: when reform is a signal of ability, policymakers will engage in too much reform. However, this essay incorporates an additional consideration---ideological preferences---and shows how these affect whether policymakers distort their behavior due to their desire to signal their ability.

The second essay in this dissertation studies how incomplete information affects the interactions between a principal, who is an``ideas person," and an agent, who helps the ideas person execute her ideas. Importantly, we study a setting where there is uncertainty about the ability of the principal and agent, and each cares about his or her relative rank. This essay builds upon the insight that, in this setting, rank-order competition incentivizes the agent to help the principal and shows how this insight has implications for the projects the principal chooses to pursue.

The final essay explores communication between a sender and receiver when the receiver can verify the sender's message by paying a cost, the size of which is her private information. This essay shows how costly verification can shape the sender's communication.