To believe or not to believe 1 This paper has benefitted from the response of the participants at the Western Finance Association Meetings in Oregon, the American Accounting Association Meetings in Chicago, the NSF/IDS Stonybrook Conference on Game Theory, the Midwest Mathematical Economics Conference at Purdue, the Annual International Meetings of the French Finance Association at the Université de Paris - Dauphine, the Winter Meetings of the Econometric Society at Atlanta, the World Congress of the Econometric Society at Barcelona, the I.I.Sc. Bangalore Conference on Game Theory and its Applications, and at the following schools: Amsterdam, Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Delaware, Indiana, INSEAD, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Purdue, Toulouse and Tulane. Ramji Balakrishnan, Jean-Pierre Benoit, Jordi Caballé, James Foster, Tom George, Larry Glosten, Puneet Handa, Yukiko Hirao, Gur Huberman, Jack Hughes, Prem Jain, Narayana Kocherlakota, Robert Litzenberger, Ernst Maug, Bill Novshek, John Parsons, Sandeep Patel, Tom Rietz, Matthew Spiegel and Tim van Zandt provided many comments, and for these we are grateful. Krishnan also thanks the Graduate School, University of Minnesota, for support. His e-mail: krishnan@msi.umn.edu 1
Titel:
To believe or not to believe 1 This paper has benefitted from the response of the participants at the Western Finance Association Meetings in Oregon, the American Accounting Association Meetings in Chicago, the NSF/IDS Stonybrook Conference on Game Theory, the Midwest Mathematical Economics Conference at Purdue, the Annual International Meetings of the French Finance Association at the Université de Paris - Dauphine, the Winter Meetings of the Econometric Society at Atlanta, the World Congress of the Econometric Society at Barcelona, the I.I.Sc. Bangalore Conference on Game Theory and its Applications, and at the following schools: Amsterdam, Berkeley, Carnegie-Mellon, Delaware, Indiana, INSEAD, Iowa, Minnesota, Ohio, Purdue, Toulouse and Tulane. Ramji Balakrishnan, Jean-Pierre Benoit, Jordi Caballé, James Foster, Tom George, Larry Glosten, Puneet Handa, Yukiko Hirao, Gur Huberman, Jack Hughes, Prem Jain, Narayana Kocherlakota, Robert Litzenberger, Ernst Maug, Bill Novshek, John Parsons, Sandeep Patel, Tom Rietz, Matthew Spiegel and Tim van Zandt provided many comments, and for these we are grateful. Krishnan also thanks the Graduate School, University of Minnesota, for support. His e-mail: krishnan@msi.umn.edu 1