Valuing Information as a Philanthropic Funder

By Dan Brown, Adam Salisbury, and Meika Ball

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

GiveWell directs around $10 million per year to fund new randomized controlled trials. Funding for new research has a high opportunity cost, as it requires us to spend less directly on programmatic activities. However, it may enable us to direct substanti...

Four New Ideas for Systematic Cost-Effectiveness Analysis

By Elizabeth D. Brown and Craig McIntosh

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Systematic learning from pooling available cost-effectiveness analyses is undermined by the low quality and availability of costing data across studies. We present four new ideas for improvement: (i) costing preanalysis plans and reporting templates, (ii)...

Can Incorrect Beliefs about the Racial Composition of Welfare and Unemployment Insurance Beneficiaries Be Changed?

By Jeffrey Carpenter, Jakina Debnam Guzman, Peter Hans Matthews, and Erin L. Wolcott

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Some argue that support for the social safety net in the United States is influenced by beliefs about the beneficiaries' race. Information treatments have the potential to change these beliefs, but for them to be policy relevant, their effects must last b...

The Role of Representational and Computational Complexity in Belief Formation

By Cuimin Ba, J. Aislinn Bohren, and Alex Imas

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We examine how representational and computational complexity interact to influence belief updating. Building on the two-stage belief updating model of Ba, Bohren, and Imas (2024), we show that when no salience cues are present, attentional and processing ...

Extracting Statistical Relationships from Observational Data: Predicting with Full or Partial Information

By Guillaume R. Fréchette, Emanuel Vespa, and Sevgi Yuksel

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

Decision-makers sometimes rely on past data to learn statistical relationships between variables. However, when predicting a target variable, they must adjust how they aggregate past information depending on the observables available. If agents have infor...

Real and Assumed Information

By Ned Augenblick, Matthew Backus, Andrew T. Little, and Don A. Moore

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

We consider a simplified version of the model in Augenblick et. al (2025), in which people use models to translate data into beliefs and predictions. We posit that they make correct inferences given a model but not unconditionally, forgetting model uncert...

Gender Salience and Chat-Based Communication in Teams

By Rebecca Jack

AEA Papers and Proceedings, May 2025

I use a lab experiment to study the effect of gender priming on chat-based communication in mixed- and same-gender teams with a real-effort task. I find that priming gender seems to evoke stereotypes about men's and women's roles in communication, causing...

Information Acquisition and Time-Risk Preference

By Daniel Chen and Weijie Zhong

American Economic Review: Insights, June 2025

An agent acquires information dynamically until her belief about a binary state reaches an upper or lower threshold. She can choose any signal process subject to a constraint on the rate of entropy reduction. Strategies are ordered by "time risk"—the di...

Aggregate Shocks and the Formation of Preferences and Beliefs

By Paola Giuliano and Antonio Spilimbergo

Journal of Economic Literature, June 2025

A growing body of work highlights how aggregate shocks shape preferences and beliefs. This review synthesizes findings from sociology, social psychology, and economics to explore the significance of these shocks, how the period in which they are experienc...

Information Systems, Service Delivery, and Corruption: Evidence from the Bangladesh Civil Service

By Martin Mattsson

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, July 2025

Slow public service delivery and corruption are common problems in low- and middle-income countries. Can better management information systems improve delivery speed? Does improving the delivery speed reduce corruption? In a large-scale experiment with th...

Search, Screening, and Sorting

By Xiaoming Cai, Pieter Gautier, and Ronald Wolthoff

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, July 2025

We examine how search frictions impact labor market sorting by constructing a model consistent with evidence that employers interview a subset of a pool of applicants. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for sorting in applications and matches. ...

Information Acquisition and Product Differentiation Perception

By Gary Biglaiser, Jiadong Gu, and Fei Li

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We consider the equilibrium interplay between sellers' price competition and consumers' perception of product differentiation. We analyze a situation where, before trading, consumers acquire information at a cost about their preferences between sellers' d...

Bargaining and Information Acquisition

By Kalyan Chatterjee, Miaomiao Dong, and Tetsuya Hoshino

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We consider an ultimatum game where the value of the object being sold to the buyer is high or low. The seller knows the value, but the buyer does not. The value to the seller is zero. We introduce the option for the buyer to acquire costly information af...

Learning When to Quit: An Empirical Model of Experimentation in Standards Development

By Bernhard Ganglmair, Timothy Simcoe, and Emanuele Tarantino

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

Using data from the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), a voluntary organization that develops protocols for managing internet infrastructure, we estimate a dynamic discrete choice model of the decision to continue or abandon a line of research. The m...

Reputation and Efficiency: Information Design

By Allen Vong

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

A firm trades with a sequence of consumers who are unsure about the firm's competence and its effort to supply quality. I examine rating systems that sustain efficient outcomes in virtually all trades by providing consumers with information to motivate a ...

Asymptotic Learning with Ambiguous Information

By Pëllumb Reshidi, João Thereze, and Mu Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We study asymptotic learning when the decision-maker faces ambiguity in the precision of her information sources. She aims to estimate a state and evaluates outcomes according to the worst-case scenario. Under prior-by-prior updating, we characterize the ...

Knowledge Spillovers and Inequality

By Jan Eeckhout and Boyan Jovanovic

American Economic Review, December 2002

We develop a dynamic model with knowledge spillovers in production. The model contains two opposing forces. Imitation of other firms helps followers catch up with leaders, but the prospect of doing so makes followers want to free ride. The second force do...

Keep Your Enemies Closer: Strategic Platform Adjustments during US and French Elections

By Rafael Di Tella, Randy Kotti, Caroline Le Pennec, and Vincent Pons

American Economic Review, August 2025

We study changes in political discourse during campaigns, using a novel dataset of candidate websites for US House elections, 2002–2016, and manifestos for French parliamentary and local elections, 1958–2022. We find that candidates move to the center...

Cursed Sequential Equilibrium

By Meng-Jhang Fong, Po-Hsuan Lin, and Thomas R. Palfrey

American Economic Review, August 2025

This paper develops a framework to extend the strategic form analysis of cursed equilibrium (CE) developed by Eyster and Rabin (2005) to multistage games. The approach uses behavioral strategies rather than normal form mixed strategies and imposes sequent...

The Folk Economics of Housing

[Symposium: Housing Markets]

By Christopher S. Elmendorf, Clayton Nall, and Stan Oklobdzija

Journal of Economic Perspectives, Summer 2025

Why is housing supply so severely restricted in US cities and suburbs? Urban economists offer two primary hypotheses: homeowner self-interest and political fragmentation. Homeowners, who outnumber and have organizational advantages over renters, are said ...