Efficiency in Auctions with Private and Common Values: An Experimental Study

By K. Goeree and Theo Offerman

American Economic Review, June 2002

Auctions are generally not efficient when the object's expected value depends on private and common value information. We report a series of first-price auction experiments to measure the degree of inefficiency that occurs with financially motivated bidde...

The Economics of Social Media

By Guy Aridor, Rafael Jiménez-Durán, Ro'ee Levy, and Lena Song

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

We provide a guide to the burgeoning literature on the economics of social media. We first define social media platforms and highlight their unique features. We then synthesize the main lessons from the empirical economics literature and organize them aro...

Reputation and Competition

By Johannes Hörner

American Economic Review, June 2002

This paper shows how competition generates reputation-building behavior in repeated interactions when the product quality observed by consumers is a noisy signal of firms' effort level. There are two types of firms and "good" firms try to distinguish them...

Five Facts about MPCs: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

By Johannes Boehm, Etienne Fize, and Xavier Jaravel

American Economic Review, January 2025

We present five facts from an experiment on the marginal propensity to consume (MPC) out of transitory transfers: (1) the one-month MPC on a cash-like transfer is 23 percent; (2) it is substantially higher (61 percent) on a transfer administered via a car...

Universalism: Global Evidence

By Alexander W. Cappelen, Benjamin Enke, and Bertil Tungodden

American Economic Review, January 2025

This paper leverages nationally representative surveys across 60 countries and 64,000 respondents to present novel stylized facts about the relationship-specific nature of altruism. Across individuals, universalist preferences systematically vary with dem...

Smart Thermostats, Automation, and Time-Varying Prices

By Joshua Blonz, Karen Palmer, Casey J. Wichman, and Derek C. Wietelman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Can automation complement economic incentives? We explore this question by randomly encouraging households to activate a feature on their existing smart thermostat that automates responsiveness to time-of-use electricity pricing. The feature reduces air c...

The Willingness to Pay for a Cooler Day: Evidence from 50 Years of Major League Baseball Games

By Kevin Kuruc, Melissa LoPalo, and Sean O'Connor

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

The climate economy literature has documented adverse effects of extreme temperatures on well-being through mechanisms such as mortality, productivity, and conflict. Impacts due simply to discomfort are less well understood. This paper investigates indivi...

Eliciting Time Preferences When Income and Consumption Vary: Theory, Validation, and Application to Job Search

By Michèle Belot, Philipp Kircher, and Paul Muller

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We propose a simple method for eliciting individual time preferences without estimating utility functions even in settings where background consumption changes over time. It relies on eliciting preferences for receiving high stakes lottery tickets at diff...

Estimating Models of Supply and Demand: Instruments and Covariance Restrictions

By Alexander MacKay and Nathan H. Miller

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We consider the identification of empirical models of supply and demand with imperfect competition. We show that a restriction on the covariance between unobserved demand and cost shocks can resolve endogeneity and identify the price parameter. We demonst...

Triplet Embeddings for Demand Estimation

By Lorenzo Magnolfi, Jonathon McClure, and Alan Sorensen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We propose a method to augment conventional demand estimation approaches with crowd-sourced data on the product space. Our method obtains triplets data ("product A is closer to B than it is to C") from an online survey to compute an embedding—i.e., a lo...

Eliciting Ambiguity with Mixing Bets

By Patrick Schmidt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

Preferences for mixing can reveal ambiguity perception and attitude on a single event. The validity of the approach is discussed for multiple preference classes, including maxmin, maxmax, variational, and smooth second-order preferences. An experimental i...

Fueling Alternatives: Gas Station Choice and the Implications for Electric Charging

By Jackson Dorsey, Ashley Langer, and Shaun McRae

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2025

This paper quantifies the value of electric vehicle (EV) charging networks and the marginal value of network speed and density. We estimate a model of gasoline drivers' refueling preferences and simulate how these potential future EV drivers value refueli...

Sustainable Poverty Reduction through Social Assistance: Modality, Context, and Complementary Programming in Bangladesh

By Akhter Ahmed, Melissa Hidrobo, John Hoddinott, Bastien Kolt, Shalini Roy, and Salauddin Tauseef

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2025

Social assistance programs can increase consumption and reduce poverty, but less is known about whether these impacts are sustained after programs end or how design and context influence sustainability. Using data collected in two regions of Bangladesh fo...

The Long-Term Effects of Career Guidance in High School and Student Financial Aid: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment

By Laetitia Renée

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2025

This paper studies the effects of a randomized control trial in which Canadian high school students were randomly invited to participate in a career guidance program during high school and/or made eligible for extra financial aid conditional on college en...

Search Costs and Context Effects

By Heiko Karle, Florian Kerzenmacher, Heiner Schumacher, and Frank Verboven

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2025

Empirical search cost estimates are often large and increasing in the size of the transaction. We conduct an online search experiment in which we manipulate the price scale while keeping the physical search effort per price quote constant. Additionally, w...

Buy Baits and Consumer Sophistication: Field Evidence from Instant Rebates

By Matthias Rodemeier

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

Are consumers in the marketplace aware of their cognitive limitations? I answer this question in the context of a ubiquitous form of price discrimination: instant rebates that require active redemption. In a large-scale field experiment with a major onlin...

Increasing Organ Donor Registration as a Means to Increase Transplantation: An Experiment with Actual Organ Donor Registrations

By Judd B. Kessler and Alvin E. Roth

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

The United States has a severe shortage of organs for transplant. Recently—inspired by research based on hypothetical choices—jurisdictions have tried to increase organ donor registrations by changing how the registration question is asked. We evaluat...

Welfare Analysis of Changing Notches: Evidence from Bolsa Família

By Katy Bergstrom, William Dodds, and Juan Rios

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

We develop a framework to bound the welfare impacts of arbitrarily large reforms to notches using two sufficient statistics: the change in the number of households located below the new notch and the change in the number of households located below the ol...

Do Consumers Distinguish Fixed Cost from Variable Cost? "Schmeduling" in Two-Part Tariffs in Energy

By Koichiro Ito and Shuang Zhang

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

A central assumption in economics is that consumers properly distinguish fixed cost from variable cost. This assumption is fundamental to various economic theories, including optimal taxation, redistribution, and price discrimination. Using a quasi-experi...

Show Me the Money! A Field Experiment on Electric Vehicle Charge Timing

By Megan R. Bailey, David P. Brown, Blake Shaffer, and Frank A. Wolak

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2025

We use a field experiment to measure the effectiveness of financial incentives to shift the timing of electric vehicle (EV) charging. EV owners respond strongly to financial incentives, reducing charging during peak hours by 49 percent by shifting to off-...