Quality Is in the Eye of the Beholder: Taste Projection in Markets with Observational Learning

By Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch and Antonio Rosato

American Economic Review, November 2024

We study how misperceptions of others' tastes influence beliefs, demand, and prices in markets with observational learning. Consumers infer a good's quality from the quantity demanded and price paid by others. When consumers exaggerate the similarity betw...

Information and the Change in the Paradigm in Economics

By Joseph E. Stiglitz

American Economic Review, June 2002

Evaluating Behavioral Incentive Compatibility: Insights from Experiments

[Symposium: Behavioral Incentive Compatibility]

By David Danz, Lise Vesterlund, and Alistair J. Wilson

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2024

Incentive compatibility is core to mechanism design. The success of auctions, matching algorithms, and voting systems all hinge on the ability to select incentives that make it in the individual's interest to reveal their type. But how do we test whether ...

Designing Simple Mechanisms

[Symposium: Behavioral Incentive Compatibility]

By Shengwu Li

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Fall 2024

It matters whether real-world mechanisms are simple. If participants cannot see that a mechanism is incentive-compatible, they may refuse to participate or may behave in ways that undermine the mechanism. There are several ways to formalize what it means ...

Political Correctness, Social Image, and Information Transmission

By Luca Braghieri

American Economic Review, December 2024

A prominent argument in the political correctness debate is that people feel pressure to publicly espouse sociopolitical views they do not privately hold, and that such misrepresentations might render public discourse less vibrant and informative. This pa...

Beliefs in Repeated Games: An Experiment

By Masaki Aoyagi, Guillaume R. Fréchette, and Sevgi Yuksel

American Economic Review, December 2024

This paper uses a laboratory experiment to study beliefs and their relationship to action and strategy choices in finitely and indefinitely repeated prisoners' dilemma games. We find subjects' elicited beliefs about the other player's action are generally...

Bias and Sensitivity under Ambiguity

By Zhen Huo, Marcelo Pedroni, and Guangyu Pei

American Economic Review, December 2024

This paper characterizes the effects of ambiguity aversion under dispersed information. The equilibrium outcome is observationally equivalent to a Bayesian forecast of the fundamental with increased sensitivity to signals and a pessimistic bias. This equi...

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...

Should They Compete or Should They Cooperate? The View of Agency Theory

By Pierre Fleckinger, David Martimort, and Nicolas Roux

Journal of Economic Literature, December 2024

What is the most efficient way of designing incentives in an organization? Over the past five decades, agency theory has provided various answers to this crucial question. This line of research suggests that, depending on the organizational context, the o...

Media Coverage of Immigration and the Polarization of Attitudes

By Sarah Schneider-Strawczynski and Jérôme Valette

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

This paper investigates the effect of media coverage on immigration attitudes. It combines data on immigration coverage in French television with individual panel data from 2013 to 2017 that records respondents' preferred television channel and attitudes ...

Betting on the House: Subjective Expectations and Market Choices

By Nicolas Bottan and Ricardo Perez-Truglia

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

Home price expectations play a central role in macroeconomics and finance. However, there is little direct evidence on their effect on market choices. We provide causal evidence using a large-scale, high-stakes field experiment in the United States. We se...

Digital Information Provision and Behavior Change: Lessons from Six Experiments in East Africa

By Raissa Fabregas, Michael Kremer, Matthew Lowes, Robert On, and Giulia Zane

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2025

While some studies suggest mobile phone–based information programs change behavior; others find no effect. We evaluate six text message agricultural extension programs, collectively covering 128,000 farmers. A meta-analysis finds a 1.22-fold increase in...

Managing Dynamic Competition

By Tracy R. Lewis and Huseyin Yildirim

American Economic Review, September 2002

In many important high-technology markets, including software development, data processing, communications, aeronautics, and defense, suppliers learn through experience how to provide better service at lower cost. This paper examines how a buyer designs d...

Rational Inattention and the Business Cycle Effects of Productivity and News Shocks

By Bartosz Maćkowiak and Mirko Wiederholt

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2025

We solve a real business cycle model with rational inattention (an RI-RBC model). In the RI-RBC model, the growth rates of employment, investment, and output are about as persistent as in the data, with an amount of inattention consistent with survey data...

A Random Dictator Is All You Need

By Itai Arieli, Yakov Babichenko, Inbal Talgam-Cohen, and Konstantin Zabarnyi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

We study information aggregation with a decision-maker aggregating binary recommendations from symmetric agents. Each agent's recommendation depends on her private information about a hidden state. While the decision-maker knows the prior distribution ove...

Scoring Strategic Agents

By Ian Ball

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2025

I introduce a model of predictive scoring. A receiver wants to predict a sender's quality. An intermediary observes multiple features of the sender and aggregates them into a score. Based on the score, the receiver makes a decision. The sender prefers "hi...

Monitoring, Motivation, and Management: The Determinants of Opportunistic Behavior in a Field Experiment

By Daniel S. Nagin, James B. Rebitzer, Seth Sanders, and Lowell J. Taylor

American Economic Review, September 2002

Economic models of incentives in employment relationships are based on a specific theory of motivation: employees are "rational cheaters," who anticipate the consequences of their actions and shirk when the marginal benefits exceed costs. We investigate t...

Hedging When Applying: Simultaneous Search with Correlation

By S. Nageeb Ali and Ran I. Shorrer

American Economic Review, February 2025

Applicants to schools, colleges, and jobs hedge by applying to a broad range of options, including reaches, matches, and safeties. We develop a simultaneous-search framework that rationalizes this practice. In this framework, the admissions process is cor...

Robust Monopoly Regulation

By Yingni Guo and Eran Shmaya

American Economic Review, February 2025

We study how to regulate a monopolistic firm using a robust-design, non-Bayesian approach. We derive a policy that minimizes the regulator's worst-case regret, where regret is the difference between the regulator's complete-information payoff and his real...