Intrinsic Information Preferences and Skewness

By Yusufcan Masatlioglu, YeÅŸim Orhun, and Collin Raymond

American Economic Review, October 2023

We examine whether people have an intrinsic preference for negatively skewed or positively skewed information structures and how these preferences relate to intrinsic preferences for informativeness. The results from lab experiments show a strong intrinsi...

Matching Mechanisms for Refugee Resettlement

By David Delacrétaz, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Teytelboym

American Economic Review, October 2023

Current refugee resettlement processes account for neither the preferences of refugees nor the priorities of hosting communities. We introduce a new framework for matching with multidimensional knapsack constraints that captures the (possibly multidimensi...

Monitor Reputation and Transparency

By Iván Marinovic and Martin Szydlowski

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2023

We study the disclosure policy of a regulator overseeing a monitor with reputation concerns. The monitor faces a manager, who chooses how much to manipulate based on the monitor's reputation. Reputational incentives are strongest for intermediate reputati...

A Model of Sequential Crisis Management

By Fei Li and Jidong Zhou

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2023

We propose a model of how multiple societies respond to a common crisis. A government faces a "damned-either-way" policymaking dilemma: aggressive intervention contains the crisis, but the resulting good outcome makes people skeptical about the costly res...

Herd Design

By Itai Arieli, Ronen Gradwohl, and Rann Smorodinsky

American Economic Review: Insights, December 2023

The classic herding model examines the asymptotic behavior of agents who observe their predecessors' actions as well as a private signal from an exogenous information structure. In this paper, we introduce a self-interested sender into the model and study...

Is It Who You Are or What You Get? Comparing the Impacts of Loans and Grants for Microenterprise Development

By Bruno Crépon, Mohamed El Komi, and Adam Osman

American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, January 2024

Is the type of financial support provided to businesses more important than which businesses receive it? Loans and grants can lead to differences in optimal investments and in scope for moral hazard. We randomize 3,293 business loan applicants into receiv...

Disentangling Moral Hazard and Adverse Selection

By Henrique Castro-Pires, Hector Chade, and Jeroen Swinkels

American Economic Review, January 2024

While many real-world principal-agent problems have both moral hazard and adverse selection, existing tools largely analyze only one at a time. Do the insights from the separate analyses survive when the frictions are combined? We develop a simple methodâ...

Adverse Selection Dynamics in Privately Produced Safe Debt Markets

By Nathan Foley-Fisher, Gary Gorton, and Stéphane Verani

American Economic Journal: Macroeconomics, January 2024

Privately produced safe debt is designed so that there is no adverse selection in trade. But in some macro states—here, the onset of the pandemic—it becomes profitable for some agents to produce private information, and then agents face adverse select...

Social Connectedness and Information Markets

By Rachel Kranton and David McAdams

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2024

This paper investigates information quality in a simple model of socially connected information markets. Suppliers' payoffs derive from the fraction of consumers who see their stories. Consumers prefer to share and act only on high-quality information. Qu...

Constructive versus Toxic Argumentation in Debates

By Tymofiy Mylovanov and Andriy Zapechelnyuk

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, February 2024

Two debaters address an audience by sequentially choosing their information strategies. We compare the setting where the second mover reveals additional information (constructive argumentation) with the setting where the second mover obfuscates the first ...

Experimental Evidence on the Effectiveness of Nonexperts for Improving Vaccine Demand

By Marcella Alsan and Sarah Eichmeyer

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, February 2024

We experimentally vary signals and senders to identify which combination will increase vaccine demand among a disadvantaged population in the United States—Black and White men without a college education. Our main finding is that laypeople (nonexpert co...

The Comparative Statics of Sorting

By Axel Anderson and Lones Smith

American Economic Review, March 2024

We create a general and tractable theory of increasing sorting in pairwise matching models with monetary transfers. The positive quadrant dependence partial order subsumes Becker (1973) as the extreme cases with most and least sorting and implies increasi...

The Gender Gap in Confidence: Expected but Not Accounted For

By Christine L. Exley and Kirby Nielsen

American Economic Review, March 2024

We investigate how the gender gap in confidence affects the views that evaluators (e.g., employers) hold about men and women. We find the confidence gap is contagious, causing evaluators to form overly pessimistic beliefs about women. This result arises e...

The Irrelevance of Fee Structures for Certification

By Martin Pollrich and Roland Strausz

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

In models of certification, possible restrictions on the nature of the fee structures are commonly analyzed. We show that they are irrelevant for the certifier's ability to maximize profits and trade efficiency. Our results establish that certification sc...

Can Financial Incentives to Firms Improve Apprenticeship Training? Experimental Evidence from Ghana

By Gabriel Brown, Morgan Hardy, Isaac Mbiti, Jamie McCasland, and Isabelle Salcher

American Economic Review: Insights, March 2024

We use a field experiment to test whether financial incentives can improve the quality of apprenticeship training. Trainers (firm owners) in the treatment group participated in a tournament incentive scheme where they received a payment based on their app...

Mediation, Military, and Money: The Promises and Pitfalls of Outside Interventions to End Armed Conflicts

By Dominic Rohner

Journal of Economic Literature, March 2024

Wars impose tremendous costs on societies and the question of how to end them is of foremost importance. Several hundred books and scientific articles have been written on peace agreements and third-party interventions. In this article I provide a criti...

Contingent Reasoning and Dynamic Public Goods Provision

By Evan M. Calford and Timothy N. Cason

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

Contributions toward public goods often reveal information that is useful to others considering their own contributions. This experiment compares static and dynamic contribution decisions to determine how contingent reasoning differs in dynamic decisions ...

(Reverse) Price Discrimination with Information Design

By Dong Wei and Brett Green

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

A seller markets a good to a customer whose willingness to pay depends on his private type and the good's quality. The seller designs a screening mechanism that specifies both transfers and information revealed about quality. We show that the optimal mech...

Strategic Incentives and the Optimal Sale of Information

By Rosina Rodríguez Olivera

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2024

A monopolist data seller offers information to privately informed data buyers. I characterize the seller's optimal menu, which screens between two types of buyers. Buyers' preferences for information allow the seller to extract all surplus, and the optima...

Time Aggregation in Health Insurance Deductibles

By Long Hong and Corina Mommaerts

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, May 2024

Health insurance plans increasingly pay for expenses only beyond a large annual deductible. This paper explores the implications of deductibles that reset over shorter timespans. We develop a model of insurance demand between two actuarially equivalent de...