Welfare of Competitive Price Discrimination with Captive Consumers

By Yanlin Chen, Xianwen Shi, and Jun Zhang

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study the welfare effects of price discrimination in a duopoly with both captive and contested consumers. Using a unified information design approach, we characterize the best and worst market segmentations for producer surplus, consumer surplus, and s...

Sequential Protest Formation

By Benjamin Matta

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

People participate in protests even though it is costly, benefits are not exclusive to participants, and each individual is unlikely to be pivotal. Building on these characteristics, I propose a sequential model of protest formation where opportunities to...

Liquidity Constraints and the Value of Insurance

By Keith Marzilli Ericson and Justin Sydnor

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

Insurance moves resources across both time and states. We study the consumption-smoothing benefits of insurance under liquidity constraints in a model where contracts span multiple consumption periods. The normative benchmarks for insurance demand under l...

Failures of Contingent Reasoning in Annuitization Decisions

By Erzo F.P. Luttmer ⓡ Priscila De Oliveira ⓡ Dmitry Taubinsky

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

This paper studies psychological biases in take-up of annuities, using an incentivized experiment with a probability-based sample (N = 3,038). Choosing an annuity was payoff-maximizing in the experiment at all prices, but take-up was incomplete and price ...

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Ascending Auction

By Bernhard Kasberger and Alexander Teytelboym

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

The Combinatorial Multi-Round Ascending Auction (CMRA) is a new auction format used in recent European spectrum auctions. We show that an auction-specific version of truthful bidding leads to an efficient allocation. We then characterize different ex post...

Exploiting Rivals' Strengths

By Giacomo Calzolari and Vincenzo Denicolò

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We analyze oligopolistic competition in which firms use contracts contingent on what buyers purchase from their rivals. We present a new mechanism through which a dominant firm, by using these contracts, can gain more from exploiting its rivals than from ...

Product Liability Litigation and Innovation: Evidence from Medical Devices

By Alberto Galasso and Hong Luo

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study the impact of product liability litigation on new product introductions by leading medical device firms. We find that the defendant firms, and other firms to a lesser extent, reduce their propensity to introduce new products in the litigated prod...

Collusion by Exclusion in Public Procurement

By Regina Seibel and Samuel Škoda

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

This paper studies bid rigging in auctions with bidder preselection. We develop a theoretical model to analyze the optimal behavior of partial bid-rigging cartels and show how commonly used two-stage auction formats, in which the first stage is used to pr...

Optimal Design of Market Access

By Takuro Yamashita and Shuguang Zhu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study a data provider's problem of optimally designing and selling marketing lists that enable a retailer with private types to access consumers with heterogeneous characteristics. When virtual values satisfy a particular form of convexity (named bound...

Higher-Order Beliefs and (Mis)learning from Prices

By Kevin He and Jonathan Libgober

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We study misperceptions of private-signal correlation in an incomplete-information Cournot duopoly game. Exaggerating the correlation between players' demand signals is beneficial when agents hold flexible beliefs about price elasticity but is harmful whe...

The Effects of Sin Taxes and Advertising Restrictions in a Dynamic Equilibrium

By Rossi Abi-Rafeh, Pierre Dubois, Rachel Griffith, and Martin O'Connell

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We develop a dynamic equilibrium model of firm competition to analyze the effects of counterfactual policies, such as taxes and advertising restrictions, on pricing, advertising, consumption, and welfare. Using micro-level data, we estimate how consumer e...

The Economics of Discriminatory Job Reservations

By James P. Choy

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

A society reserves certain jobs for members of a politically dominant social group to maximize the wages of workers in that group. Through an appropriate choice of reserved jobs, the dominant group chooses both the size of the set of reserved jobs and the...

Data Linkages and Privacy Regulation

By Rossella Argenziano and Alessandro Bonatti

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

We assess the efficacy of privacy regulation when consumers are privacy conscious. We develop a model of data linkages where a consumer interacts sequentially with two firms: One firm collects data on consumer behavior, and the other firm leverages the da...

Rational Misspecification: Framework and Applications

By Ran Eilat and Kfir Eliaz

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, August 2026

This paper proposes a framework for assessing whether misspecified decision-makers would be willing to pay for information that can potentially make them less misspecified. We introduce a prior-free approach, based on "constrained" maximal regret, to deri...

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

Rainfall Inequality, Political Power, and Ethnic Conflict in Africa

By Andrea Guariso and Thorsten Rogall

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

How are ethnic inequality and ethnic violence related? We empirically investigate this question using an innovative measure of resource inequality between ethnic groups, based on rainfall in ethnic homelands during the plant-growing season. Our main datas...

The Welfare Effects of Eligibility Expansions: Theory and Evidence from SNAP

By Jenna Anders and Charlie Rafkin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

We study how eligibility expansions in the US Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) affect take-up among previously eligible households and social welfare. Using an event study with administrative take-up data, we document a "woodwork effect": ...

When the Effects of Informational Interventions Are Driven by Salience—Evidence from School Parents in Brazil

By Guilherme Lichand, Nina Cunha, Ricardo A. Madeira, and Eric Bettinger

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

Do informational interventions work because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction or, to a large extent, because they increase the salience of the decision they target? We randomly assign parents to either an information group...

Hurricanes, Climate Change Policies, and Electoral Accountability

By Stefano Gagliarducci, M. Daniele Paserman, and Eleonora Patacchini

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

This paper studies the conditions under which legislators promote policies that may be unpopular in the short term but yield long-term benefits. Using data on the universe of federal disaster declarations from 1989 to 2020, we document that representative...

The Value of School Social Climate Information: Evidence from Chicago Housing Transactions

By Rene A. Crespin

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, August 2026

Educational institutions increasingly measure and publish indicators of social climate. I exploit a plausibly exogenous shock of Chicago school information to examine how social climate information is capitalized into housing markets and affects homebuyer...