Who Matters in Coordination Problems?

By József Sákovics and Jakub Steiner

American Economic Review, December 2012

Agents face a coordination problem akin to the adoption of a network technology. A principal announces investment subsidies that, at minimal cost, attain a given likelihood of successful coordination. Optimal subsidies target agents who impose high ext...

Social Learning with Coarse Inference

By Antonio Guarino and Philippe Jehiel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2013

We study social learning by boundedly rational agents. Agents take a decision in sequence, after observing their predecessors and a private signal. They are unable to make perfect inferences from their predecessors' decisions: they only understand the r...

Public Transfers and Domestic Violence: The Roles of Private Information and Spousal Control

By Gustavo J. Bobonis, Melissa González-Brenes, and Roberto Castro

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2013

We study whether transfer programs in which funds are targeted to women decrease the incidence of spousal abuse. We examine the impact of the Mexican Oportunidades program on spousal abuse rates and threats of violence using data from a specialized sur...

Pandering to Persuade

By Yeon-Koo Che, Wouter Dessein, and Navin Kartik

American Economic Review, February 2013

An agent advises a principal on selecting one of multiple projects or an outside option. The agent is privately informed about the projects' benefits and shares the principal's preferences except for not internalizing her value from the outside option. ...

School Admissions Reform in Chicago and England: Comparing Mechanisms by Their Vulnerability to Manipulation

By Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez

American Economic Review, February 2013

In Fall 2009, Chicago authorities abandoned a school assignment mechanism midstream, citing concerns about its vulnerability to manipulation. Nonetheless, they asked thousands of applicants to re-rank schools in a new mechanism that is also manipulable...

Selection on Moral Hazard in Health Insurance

By Liran Einav, Amy Finkelstein, Stephen P. Ryan, Paul Schrimpf, and Mark R. Cullen

American Economic Review, February 2013

We use employee-level panel data from a single firm to explore the possibility that individuals may select insurance coverage in part based on their anticipated behavioral ("moral hazard") response to insurance, a phenomenon we label "selection on mora...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, February 2013

The Case against Patents

[Symposium: Patents]

By Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2013

The case against patents can be summarized briefly: there is no empirical evidence that they serve to increase innovation and productivity, unless productivity is identified with the number of patents awarded—which, as evidence shows, has no correl...

Structural Models of Nonequilibrium Strategic Thinking: Theory, Evidence, and Applications

By Vincent P. Crawford, Miguel A. Costa-Gomes, and Nagore Iriberri

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2013

Most applications of game theory assume equilibrium, justified by presuming either that learning will have converged to one, or that equilibrium approximates people's strategic thinking even when a learning justification is implausible. Yet several recent...

School Inputs, Household Substitution, and Test Scores

By Jishnu Das, Stefan Dercon, James Habyarimana, Pramila Krishnan, Karthik Muralidharan, and Venkatesh Sundararaman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, April 2013

Empirical studies of the relationship between school inputs and test scores typically do not account for household responses to changes in school inputs. Evidence from India and Zambia shows that student test scores are higher when schools receive unan...

Designing Random Allocation Mechanisms: Theory and Applications

By Eric Budish, Yeon-Koo Che, Fuhito Kojima, and Paul Milgrom

American Economic Review, April 2013

Randomization is commonplace in everyday resource allocation. We generalize the theory of randomized assignment to accommodate multi-unit allocations and various real-world constraints, such as group-specific quotas ("controlled choice") in school choi...

Dynamic Matching and Bargaining Games: A General Approach

By Stephan Lauermann

American Economic Review, April 2013

Dynamic matching and bargaining games are models of decentralized markets with trading frictions. A central objective is to investigate how equilibrium outcomes depend on the level of frictions. In particular, does the trading outcome become Walrasian ...

Assignment of Arrival Slots

By James Schummer and Rakesh V. Vohra

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2013

Industry participants agree that, when inclement weather forces the FAA to reassign airport landing slots, incentives and property rights should be respected. We show that the FAA's Compression algorithm is incentive compatible, but fails to guarantee ...

Trust, Reciprocity, and Favors in Cooperative Relationships

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Kyle Bagwell

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2013

We study trust, reciprocity, and favors in a repeated trust game with private information. In our main analysis, players are willing to exhibit trust and thereby facilitate cooperative gains only if such behavior is regarded as a favor that must be rec...

Is Ignorance Bliss? The Effect of Asymmetric Information between Spouses on Intra-household Allocations

By Carolina Castilla and Thomas Walker

American Economic Review, May 2013

We conducted a field experiment in Southern Ghana to test the effect of asymmetric information on intrahousehold allocation. A lottery was conducted, where prizes were distributed in public and in private. The results indicate that asymmetric information ...

Economic Experts versus Average Americans

By Paola Sapienza and Luigi Zingales

American Economic Review, May 2013

We compare answers to policy questions by economic experts and a representative sample of the US population. We find a 35 percentage point difference between the two groups. This gap is only partially explained by differences in ideological or personal ch...

The Lure of Authority: Motivation and Incentive Effects of Power

By Ernst Fehr, Holger Herz, and Tom Wilkening

American Economic Review, June 2013

Authority and power permeate political, social, and economic life, but empirical knowledge about the motivational origins and consequences of authority is limited. We study the motivation and incentive effects of authority experimentally in an authorit...

Lemons Markets and the Transmission of Aggregate Shocks

By Pablo Kurlat

American Economic Review, June 2013

I study a dynamic economy featuring adverse selection in asset markets. Borrowing-constrained entrepreneurs sell past projects to finance new investment, but asymmetric information creates a lemons problem. I show that this friction is equivalent to a tax...

Private Information and the Allocation of Land Use Subsidies in Malawi

By B. Kelsey Jack

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2013

Efficient targeting of public programs is difficult when the cost or benefit to potential recipients is private information. This study illustrates the potential of self-selection to improve allocational outcomes in the context of a program that subsid...

Platform Competition under Asymmetric Information

By Hanna Halaburda and Yaron Yehezkel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2013

We consider platform competition in a two-sided market, where the two sides (buyers and sellers) have ex-ante uncertainty and ex-post asymmetric information concerning the value of a new technology. We find that platform competition may lead to a market...