Optimal Voting Mechanisms on Generalized Single-Peaked Domains

By Tobias Rachidi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

This paper studies the design of voting mechanisms. There are multiple alternatives, and the voters have generalized single-peaked preferences derived from median spaces as introduced in Nehring and Puppe (2007b). This class of preferences covers a wide r...

Common Ownership and Market Entry: Evidence from the Pharmaceutical Industry

By Melissa Newham, Jo Seldeslachts, and Albert Banal-Estañol

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Common ownership—where several firms are (partially) owned by the same investors—and its impact on product market competition has recently drawn much attention. This paper focuses on its implications for market entry. We consider the entry decisions o...

Optimal Trade Mechanisms with Adverse Selection and Inferential Naïvety

By Takeshi Murooka and Takuro Yamashita

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

We study an adverse selection environment in which a buyer's inferential ability is heterogeneous: A rational type correctly infers the value of the good from a seller's offer, whereas a naïve type is inattentive to the correlation between the seller's p...

Dynamic Screening and the Dual Roles of Monitoring

By Dhruva Bhaskar

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

This paper studies monitoring in long-term, self-enforcing relationships with adverse selection and moral hazard. Monitoring is used to screen low types by incentivizing them to shirk. Once high types have been identified, monitoring is used both to incen...

Simple Manipulations in School Choice Mechanisms

By Ryo Shirakawa

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Market design mechanisms are often required to be strategy proof, ensuring that no misreporting is profitable. This, however, may be overly restrictive: Real-world participants may be unable to engage in complex misreporting. In the context of school choi...

Holding Platforms Liable

By Xinyu Hua and Kathryn E. Spier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Should platforms be liable for harms suffered by users? A platform enables interactions between firms and users. Harmful firms impose larger costs on users than safe firms. If firms have deep pockets and are fully liable for harms, platform liability is u...

Social Learning and Strategic Pricing with Rating Systems

By Chia-Hui Chen, Kong-Pin Chen, and Junichiro Ishida

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Rating systems, widely used in online transactions, often reduce buyers' diverse opinions to summary statistics. To explore the consequences of this coarse aggregation, we analyze a dynamic adverse selection model where buyers share anonymous evaluations ...

Market Segmentation and Product Steering

By Stefan Terstiege and Adrien Vigier

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

A monopolistic seller possesses an inventory containing distinct products, each consumer wishes to buy a single product, and the seller can steer consumers' choices. We fully characterize the producer-consumer surplus pairs induced by market segmentation ...

Heterogeneous Noise and Stable Miscoordination

By Srinivas Arigapudi, Yuval Heller, and Amnon Schreiber

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Coordination games feature two types of equilibria: pure equilibria, where players successfully coordinate their actions, and mixed equilibria, where players frequently experience miscoordination. We investigate learning dynamics where agents observe the ...

Underestimating Learning by Doing

By Samantha Horn and George Loewenstein

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

Many economic decisions, such as whether to invest in developing new skills, change professions, or purchase a technology, benefit from accurate estimation of skill acquisition. We examine the accuracy of such predictions by having study participants pred...

(Pro-)Social Learning and Strategic Disclosure

By Roland Bénabou and Nikhil Vellodi

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

We study a sequential experimentation model with endogenous feedback. Agents choose between a safe and risky action, the latter generating stochastic rewards. When making this choice, each agent is selfishly motivated (myopic). However, agents can disclos...

On the Alignment of Consumer Surplus and Total Surplus under Competitive Price Discrimination

By Dirk Bergemann, Benjamin Brooks, and Stephen Morris

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2025

We study the role of information in Bertrand competition with differentiated goods and heterogeneous production costs. When producers know their costs and consumers know their values, consumer surplus and total surplus are aligned, in the sense that the i...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

The Management of Aid and Conflict in Africa

By Jacob Moscona

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This study investigates the relationship between the management of development aid and violent conflict in Africa. I exploit variation in World Bank project management quality driven by the assignment of project leaders of varying ability, combined with g...

Labor Supply Responses and Adjustment Frictions: A Tax-Free Year in Iceland

By Jósef Sigurdsson

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

Labor income earned in Iceland in 1987 went untaxed. I use this episode to study labor supply responses to temporary wage changes. Using a population-wide dataset of earnings and working time and two identification strategies, I estimate intensive and ext...

Local Labor Market Effects of the 2002 Bush Steel Tariffs

By James Lake and Ding Liu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

President George W. Bush imposed safeguard tariffs on steel in early 2002. Using US input-output tables and a generalized difference-in-difference methodology, we analyze the local labor market employment effects of these tariffs depending on the local la...

Public Financing and Racial Disparities: Does a Rising Tide Always Lift All Boats?

By Tian Qiu

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper studies the heterogeneous impact of local government spending across racial groups. An exogenous increase in spending results in significant improvement in White, but not Black or Hispanic, labor market outcomes such as employment rate, weekly ...

Take-up of Social Benefits: Experimental Evidence from France

By Laura Castell, Marc Gurgand, Clément Imbert, and Todor Tochev

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We report on two nationwide experiments with job seekers in France. We first show that a meeting with social services to assess eligibility and help with applications to social benefits increased new benefit take-up by 29 percent. By contrast, an online s...

The Not-So-Uniform Effects of Trade Secret Protection on Business Entry

By Asli Leblebicioğlu and Tanseli Savaşer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

We explore the consequences of trade secret protection for new business formation in the United States. We find the states that adopt the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (UTSA), which enhances intellectual property rights, experience an overall decline in firm ...

Place Effects and Geographic Inequality in Health at Birth

By Eric Chyn and Na'ama Shenhav

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, November 2025

This paper uses birth records and mothers who move to quantify the absolute and relative importance of birth location for early-life health. Using a model that includes mother and location fixed effects, we find that moving from a below- to an above-media...