Is No News (Perceived As) Bad News? An Experimental Investigation of Information Disclosure

By Ginger Zhe Jin, Michael Luca, and Daniel Martin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

This paper uses laboratory experiments to directly test a central prediction of disclosure theory: that strategic forces can lead those who possess private information to voluntarily provide it. In a simple sender-receiver game, we find that senders discl...

Coordinating Public Good Provision by Mediated Communication

By Maija Halonen-Akatwijuka and In-Uck Park

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

We examine a setup where two agents allocate a fixed budget between public goods in two areas. The agents may be biased to one area, which is their private information. Without communication, the funds are allocated inefficiently, resulting in gaps and du...

Common-Value Public Goods and Informational Social Dilemmas

By Caleb A. Cox and Brock Stoddard

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2021

We experimentally examine private information and communication in a public goods environment with uncertain returns. We consider a common-value public goods game in which the return to contribution is either high or low. Before contributing, three player...

How Research Affects Policy: Experimental Evidence from 2,150 Brazilian Municipalities

By Jonas Hjort, Diana Moreira, Gautam Rao, and Juan Francisco Santini

American Economic Review, May 2021

Can research findings change political leaders' beliefs and policies? We use experiments with 2,150 Brazilian municipalities to measure mayors' demand for and response to research information. In one experiment, we find that mayors are willing to pay to l...

Five Facts about Beliefs and Portfolios

By Stefano Giglio, Matteo Maggiori, Johannes Stroebel, and Stephen Utkus

American Economic Review, May 2021

We study a newly designed survey administered to a large panel of wealthy retail investors. The survey elicits beliefs that are important for macroeconomics and finance, and matches respondents with administrative data on their portfolio composition, th...

Learning and Corruption on Monitoring Chains

By Bruno Strulovici

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

"But who will guard the guardians?" I revisit this age-old question under the following assumptions: (i) guardians are devoid of ethical motives and have quasilinear preferences, (ii) guardians monitor one another through a monitoring chain, and (iii) any...

Constrained Retrospective Search

By Can Urgun and Leeat Yariv

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

The search for good outcomes—be it government policies, technological breakthroughs, or lasting purchases—takes time and effort. At times, the decision process is unconstrained: an individual seeking a well-priced product determines her search scope a...

Product Proliferation under Rational Inattention: Application to Health Insurance

By Zach Y. Brown and Jihye Jeon

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2021

In markets with complicated products such as insurance, why do firms offer many products even when consumers appear to receive little benefit? We show that when consumers face information acquisition costs, firms may have an incentive to introduce many un...

Types of Contact: A Field Experiment on Collaborative and Adversarial Caste Integration

By Matt Lowe

American Economic Review, June 2021

I estimate the effects of collaborative and adversarial intergroup contact. I randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to participate in cricket leagues or to serve as a control group. League players faced variation in collaborative contact, thr...

Digitization and Pre-purchase Information: The Causal and Welfare Impacts of Reviews and Crowd Ratings

By Imke Reimers and Joel Waldfogel

American Economic Review, June 2021

Digitization has led to many new creative products, straining the capacity of professional critics and consumers. Yet, the digitization of retailing has also delivered new crowd-based sources of pre-purchase information. We compare the relative impacts of...

Discrete Choice under Risk with Limited Consideration

By Levon Barseghyan, Francesca Molinari, and Matthew Thirkettle

American Economic Review, June 2021

This paper is concerned with learning decision-makers' preferences using data on observed choices from a finite set of risky alternatives. We propose a discrete choice model with unobserved heterogeneity in consideration sets and in standard risk aversion...

Digital Dystopia

By Jean Tirole

American Economic Review, June 2021

Autocratic regimes, democratic majorities, private platforms, and religious or professional organizations can achieve social control by managing the flow of information about individuals' behavior. Bundling the agents' political, organizational, or religi...

Communication Infrastructure and Stabilizing Food Prices: Evidence from the Telegraph Network in China

By Pei Gao and Yu-Hsiang Lei

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2021

This paper exploits a unique historical setting―the expansion of the telegraph network in nineteenth-century China when railroads were limited―to examine whether the reduction of information frictions stabilizes grain prices. Employing a difference-in...

A Sociological Perspective on Gender and Career Outcomes

[Symposium: Sociology and Economics]

By Barbara F. Reskin and Denise D. Bielby

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

Utilitarian Aggregation with Heterogeneous Beliefs

By Antoine Billot and Xiangyu Qu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

The utilitarian aggregation rule requires social utility and beliefs to be a convex combination of individual utilities and beliefs, respectively. Since, in the case of belief heterogeneity, the standard Pareto condition is incompatible with such a separa...

Information Redundancy Neglect versus Overconfidence: A Social Learning Experiment

By Marco Angrisani, Antonio Guarino, Philippe Jehiel, and Toru Kitagawa

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

We study social learning in a continuous action space experiment. Subjects, acting in sequence, state their beliefs about the value of a good after observing their predecessors' statements and a private signal. We compare the behavior in the laboratory wi...

Experimentation with Self-Serving Attribution Biases

By Nina Hestermann and Yves Le Yaouanq

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2021

We study an experimentation problem in a situation where the outcomes depend on the decision-maker's intrinsic ability and on an external variable. We analyze the mistakes made by individuals who hold inaccurate prior beliefs about their ability. Overconf...

Russian Retrospectives on Reforms from Yeltsin to Putin

[Symposium: The Economy of Russia]

By Padma Desai

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

The kamikaze crew of liberal reformers, picked by former President Boris Yeltsin in the early 1990s, succeeded in overturning the planned economy and the authoritarian political arrangements of seven decades of Soviet Communism. However, the resulting bre...

Mediation in Reputational Bargaining

By Jack Fanning

American Economic Review, August 2021

Can an uninformed mediator improve outcomes in a dynamic reputational bargaining model? I show that a simple communication protocol used by professional mediators, of announcing an agreement only if both parties privately accept its terms, can increase th...

The Role of Oligarchs in Russian Capitalism

[Symposium: The Economy of Russia]

By Sergei Guriev and Andrei Rachinsky

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Winter 2005

Using a unique dataset, we describe the degree of ownership concentration in Russian economy and its role in shaping economic and political institutions in Russia. In particular, we find that Russian "oligarchs" do control a substantial part of the econom...