Self-Persuasion: Evidence from Field Experiments at International Debating Competitions

By Peter Schwardmann, Egon Tripodi, and Joël J. van der Weele

American Economic Review, April 2022

Laboratory evidence shows that when people have to argue for a given position, they persuade themselves about the position's factual and moral superiority. Such self-persuasion limits the potential of communication to resolve conflict and reduce polarizat...

Does Context Outweigh Individual Characteristics in Driving Voting Behavior? Evidence from Relocations within the United States

By Enrico Cantoni and Vincent Pons

American Economic Review, April 2022

We measure the overall influence of contextual versus individual factors (e.g., voting rules and media as opposed to race and education) on voter behavior, and explore underlying mechanisms. Using a US-wide voter-level panel, 2008–2018, we examine voter...

Intermediation and Steering: Competition in Prices and Commissions

By Tat-How Teh and Julian Wright

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

We explore the implications of steering by an informed profit-maximizing intermediary. The intermediary steers consumers by recommending firms, taking into account both the commissions firms offer and the prices they set. Such steering results in higher c...

Hump-Shaped Cross-Price Effects and the Extensive Margin in Cross-Border Shopping

By Richard Friberg, Frode Steen, and Simen A. Ulsaker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

This paper examines the effect of cross-border shopping on grocery demand in Norway using monthly store × category sales data from Norway's largest grocery chain 2012–2016. The sensitivity of demand to the foreign price is hump-shaped and greatest 30â€...

Transforming Ordinal Riskless Utility into Cardinal Risky Utility: A Comment on Chung, Glimcher, and Tymula (2019)

By Peter P. Wakker

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2022

Chung, Glimcher, and Tymula (2019) observed both consumers' choices over commodity bundles and choices under risk. They assumed a cardinal riskless utility function V representing consumer choices and a cardinal risky utility function U. The two were inco...

Do Environmental Regulations Affect the Decision to Export?

By Jevan Cherniwchan and Nouri Najjar

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2022

This paper investigates how a common form of environmental regulation—air quality standards—affects exporters. We develop a simple theoretical model to show how the design of these standards causes (i) some firms to stop exporting and (ii) a reduction...

Eliciting People's First-Order Concerns: Text Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Questions

By Beatrice Ferrario and Stefanie Stantcheva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We illustrate the design and use of open-ended survey questions to elicit people's first-order concerns on policies. Closed-ended questions are the backbone of surveys but may prime respondents to select some answers and may omit relevant options. Open-en...

Measuring Police Performance: Public Attitudes Expressed in Twitter

By Taeho Kim

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

I study the viability of Twitter-based measures for measuring public attitudes about the police. I find that Twitter-based measures track Gallup's measure of public attitudes toward the police starting around 2014, when the Twitter user base stabilized, b...

More than Shelter: The Effect of Rental Eviction Moratoria on Household Well-Being

By Xudong An, Stuart A. Gabriel, and Nitzan Tzur-Ilan

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We investigate the impact of the 2020 COVID-19 rental eviction moratoria on household well-being. Analysis of new panel data indicates that eviction moratoria reduced evictions and resulted in redirection of scarce household financial resources to immedia...

Revealed Preferences for Randomization: An Overview

By Marina Agranov and Pietro Ortoleva

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We survey the empirical evidence on subjects' desire to randomize and its relation to stochastic choice. Preferences for randomization are documented by a substantial body of empirical work using different methodologies and in several domains, including o...

Efficient Full Implementation via Transfers: Uniqueness and Sensitivity in Symmetric Environments

By Mariann Ollár and Antonio Penta

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We study efficient full implementation via transfers in unique rationalizable strategies in environments that are symmetric in two senses: first, agents display the same total level of preference interdependence; second, types are commonly known to be dra...

Improving Willingness-to-Pay Elicitation by Including a Benchmark Good

By Rebecca Dizon-Ross and Seema Jayachandran

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2022

We propose and validate a simple way to augment the standard Becker-DeGroot-Marschak method that researchers use to elicit willingness to pay (WTP) for a good. The augmentation is to measure WTP for another good ("benchmark good"), one unrelated to both t...

Peer Effects in Product Adoption

By Michael Bailey, Drew Johnston, Theresa Kuchler, Johannes Stroebel, and Arlene Wong

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

We use de-identified data from Facebook to study the nature of peer effects in the market for cell phones. To identify peer effects, we exploit variation in friends' new phone acquisitions resulting from random phone losses. A new phone purchase by a frie...

Emotions and Risk Attitudes

By Armando N. Meier

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2022

Previous work has shown that preferences are not always stable across time, but surprisingly little is known about the reasons for this instability. I examine whether variation in people's emotions over time predicts changes in risk attitudes. Using a lar...

When Choices Are Mistakes

By Kirby Nielsen and John Rehbeck

American Economic Review, July 2022

Using a laboratory experiment, we identify whether decision-makers consider it a mistake to violate canonical choice axioms. To do this, we incentivize subjects to report axioms they want their decisions to satisfy. Then, subjects make lottery choices whi...

Digital Addiction

By Hunt Allcott, Matthew Gentzkow, and Lena Song

American Economic Review, July 2022

Many have argued that digital technologies such as smartphones and social media are addictive. We develop an economic model of digital addiction and estimate it using a randomized experiment. Temporary incentives to reduce social media use have persistent...

Waiting to Choose: The Role of Deliberation in Intertemporal Choice

By Alex Imas, Michael A. Kuhn, and Vera Mironova

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

We study the impact of deliberation on intertemporal choices. Using multiple experiments, including a field study in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, we show that the introduction of waiting periods—a policy that temporally separates information ab...

Fairness through the Lens of Cooperative Game Theory: An Experimental Approach

By Geoffroy de Clippel and Kareen Rozen

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2022

We experimentally investigate how impartial observers allocate money to agents whose complementarity and substitutability determine the surplus that each group can achieve. Analyzing the data through the lens of axioms and solutions from cooperative game ...

All Eyes on Them: A Field Experiment on Citizen Oversight and Electoral Integrity

By Natalia Garbiras-Díaz and Mateo Montenegro

American Economic Review, August 2022

Can information and communication technologies help citizens monitor their elections? We analyze a large-scale field experiment designed to answer this question in Colombia. We leveraged Facebook advertisements sent to over 4 million potential voters to e...

Review of Drug War Heresies by MacCoun and Reuter

By Steven D. Levitt

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2003

MacCoun and Reuter's primary goal is to understand how current U.S. drug policies can be improved. They carefully describe the facts and trends regarding drug usage, criminal justice enforcement, and the harms associated with drug use, then discuss the pu...