The Doors of Perception: Theory and Evidence of Frame-Dependent Rationalizability

By Gary Charness and Alessandro Sontuoso

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We investigate how strategic behavior is affected by the set of notions (frames) used when thinking about the game. In our games the action set consists of visual objects: each player must privately choose one, trying to match the counterpart's choice. We...

Dynamic Privacy Choices

By Shota Ichihashi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

I study a dynamic model of consumer privacy and platform data collection. In each period consumers choose their level of platform activity. Greater activity generates more information about the consumer, thereby increasing platform profits. When the platf...

Stable and Efficient Resource Allocation with Contracts

By Bobak Pakzad-Hurson

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

Consider indivisible-object allocation with contracts, such as college admissions, where contracts specify majors. Can a designer guarantee a stable and (student) efficient matching? I show that contracts put stability and efficiency at odds; a necessary ...

Markets with Within-Type Adverse Selection

By Anh Nguyen and Teck Yong Tan

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We study bilateral trade with a seller owning multiple units of a good, where each unit is of binary quality. The seller privately knows her "type"—defined by the number of lemons that she own—and which units in her endowments are the lemons ("within-...

Optimal Task Scheduling under Adverse Selection and Hidden Actions

By Murali Agastya and Oleksii Birulin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

A Principal owns a project consisting of several tasks. Tasks differ, both in their innate success probabilities and their incremental benefits. Moreover, only specialists can perform these tasks. Subject to moral hazard and adverse selection, in what ord...

Ad Clutter, Time Use, and Media Diversity

By Simon P. Anderson and Martin Peitz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We introduce advertising congestion along with a time use model of consumer choice among media. Both consumers and advertisers multihome. Higher equilibrium advertising levels ensue on less popular media platforms because platforms treat consumer attentio...

Blind Disclosure

By Aaron Kolb, Marilyn Pease, Daniel W. Sacks, and Joshua Quick

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We develop and test a theory of blind disclosure. A sender chooses whether to disclose information based on a preliminary, private signal. In the unique equilibrium, contrary to the literature's canonical unraveling result, senders disclose only if their ...

Optimal Nonlinear Pricing with Data-Sensitive Consumers

By Daniel Krähmer and Roland Strausz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We study monopolistic screening when some consumers are data sensitive and incur a privacy cost if their purchase reveals information to the monopolist. The monopolist discriminates between data-sensitive and classical consumers using privacy mechanisms t...

The Good, the Bad, and the Complex: Product Design with Imperfect Information

By Vladimir Asriyan, Dana Foarta, and Victoria Vanasco

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We study the joint determination of product quality and complexity. In our model complexity affects how difficult it is for an agent to acquire information about product quality. An agent can accept or reject a product proposed by a designer, who can affe...

Reference Pricing as a Deterrent to Entry: Evidence from the European Pharmaceutical Market

By Luca Maini and Fabio Pammolli

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

External reference pricing (ERP), the practice of benchmarking domestic drug prices to foreign prices, generates an incentive for firms to withhold products from low-income countries. Using a novel moment inequality approach, we estimate a structural mode...

Upcoming Funding Opportunities from the Russell Sage Foundation

[News]

March 31, 2020

Learn more.

The Facebook filter bubble

[Research Highlight]

March 25, 2021

Is social media making America more polarized?

Call for Applications: Institute of Advanced Study School of Social Sciences

[News]

July 29, 2021

The deadline for applications is November 1, 2021.

The spread of the Women’s Temperance Crusade

[Research Highlight]

February 02, 2022

How is collective action shaped by networked information technologies?

Nobel Lecture: Banking, Credit, and Economic Fluctuations

By Ben S. Bernanke

American Economic Review, May 2023

Credit markets, including the market for bank loans, are characterized by imperfect and asymmetric information. These informational frictions can interact with other economic forces to produce periods of credit-market stress, in which intermediation is un...

Front Matter

American Economic Review, May 2023

The Cost of Information: The Case of Constant Marginal Costs

By Luciano Pomatto, Philipp Strack, and Omer Tamuz

American Economic Review, May 2023

We develop an axiomatic theory of information acquisition that captures the idea of constant marginal costs in information production: the cost of generating two independent signals is the sum of their costs, and generating a signal with probability half ...

Information, Mobile Communication, and Referral Effects

By Panle Jia Barwick, Yanyan Liu, Eleonora Patacchini, and Qi Wu

American Economic Review, May 2023

This paper uses the universe of cellphone records from a Chinese telecommunication provider for a northern Chinese city to examine the role of information exchange in urban labor markets. We provide the first direct evidence of increased communication amo...

The Costs of Job Displacement over the Business Cycle and Its Sources: Evidence from Germany

By Johannes F. Schmieder, Till von Wachter, and Jörg Heining

American Economic Review, May 2023

We document the sources behind the costs of job loss over the business cycle using administrative data from Germany. Losses in annual earnings after displacement are large, persistent, and highly cyclical, nearly doubling in size during downturns. A large...

Social Exclusion and Social Preferences: Evidence from Colombia's Leper Colony

By Diego Ramos-Toro

American Economic Review, May 2023

This paper explores the intergenerational consequences of social exclusion on prosociality. A lab-in-the-field approach in the historical region of Colombia's leper colony reveals that descendants of socially excluded individuals are locally altruistic an...