Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

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...

Contracting Environments and Efficiency in Markets with Hidden Information: An Experiment

By Wanda Mimra and Christian Waibel

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

This paper provides the first systematic analysis of the role of contracting environments on market outcomes and efficiency in markets with hidden information using experimental methods. When markets are plagued by hidden information, competition does not...

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...

Mergers, Entry, and Consumer Welfare

By Peter Caradonna, Nathan H. Miller, and Gloria Sheu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We model merger-induced entry in the context of differentiated-products price competition. We fully characterize the combinations of merger efficiencies and entrant qualities that can mitigate the adverse equilibrium welfare effects of an otherwise antico...

Church Tax Exemption and Structure of Religious Markets: A Dynamic Structural Analysis

By Raphael Corbi and Fabio Miessi Sanches

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We study the effects of church tax exemptions on the structure of religious markets. Using the Brazilian experience as a showcase, we develop and estimate a dynamic entry model of religious organizations based on temple opening and closure in geographical...

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 ...

Free Riding and Unequal Pay in Symmetric Teams

By Huseyin Yildirim

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

This paper studies dynamic incentive pay in teams where agents' efforts are perfect substitutes. It shows that the principal may unequally reward identical agents to mitigate dynamic free riding in the form of procrastination. Unequal pay effectively crea...

Monitoring Team Members: Information Waste and the Transparency Trap

By Matteo Camboni and Michael Porcellacchia

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

In a model of moral hazard in teams, we demonstrate that firms' concerns about low trust among teammates can justify two common but otherwise puzzling patterns: information waste and transparency trap. We find firms predominantly employ individual perform...

Competition and Defaults in Online Search

By Francesco Decarolis, Muxin Li, and Filippo Paternollo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

This paper offers the first systematic quantitative assessment of default-option interventions designed to mitigate Google's search dominance. By analyzing interventions in the European Economic Area (EEA), Russia, and Turkey, we find that across all thre...

Unraveling and Inefficient Matching

By Akhil Vohra

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

Labor markets unravel when workers and firms match inefficiently early under limited information. I argue that a significant determinant of unraveling is the presence of a secondary market, where firms can poach workers, and its transparency: how well fir...

Asymmetric Players in a Meritocracy: A Case for Affirmative Action

By Tanjim Hossain and John Morgan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2025

We model decisions to apply for college admission, attend job auditions, or run for C-suite positions as costly entry into meritocracies, where the entrant with the highest ability wins a reward. Ability is privately known and players generically differ i...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

Eliminating Fares to Expand Opportunities: Experimental Evidence on the Impacts of Free Public Transportation on Economic and Social Disparities

By Rebecca Brough, Matthew Freedman, and David C. Phillips

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We conduct a randomized controlled trial to study the employment effects of providing free public transportation to individuals with low incomes. A temporary subsidy that reduces the price of transit to zero has no significant effects on individuals' paid...

The Long-Run Effects of Peer Gender on Occupational Sorting and the Wage Gap

By Demid Getik and Armando N. Meier

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We study the impact of the early gender environment on inequality in the labor market. To this end, we link primary school data to occupations and earnings. We find that women exposed to more girls at critical ages earn more later on: A 10 percent increas...

Communication Barriers and Infant Health: The Intergenerational Effect of Randomly Allocating Refugees across Language Regions

By Daniel Auer and Johannes S. Kunz

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

This paper investigates the intergenerational effect of communication barriers on child health at birth. We study refugees in Switzerland who come from French- or Italian-speaking countries and who, upon arrival, are randomly allocated to different canton...

Transmitting Rights: Effective Cooperation, Inter-gender Contact, and Student Achievement

By Sultan Mehmood, Shaheen Naseer, and Daniel L. Chen

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

We provide experimental evidence of teacher-to-student transmission of gender attitudes in Pakistan. We randomly show teachers a pro-women's rights visual narrative. Treated teachers increase their and students' support for women's rights, unbiasedness in...

Fiscal Rules and the Selection of Politicians: Theory and Evidence from Italy

By Matteo Gamalerio and Federico Trombetta

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2025

Fiscal rules, or constraints on the policymaking discretion of elected officials, are widely used to regulate fiscal policies. Using data on Italian municipalities, we employ a difference-in-discontinuity design to provide evidence of the negative effect ...