Evaluating Deliberative Competence: A Simple Method with an Application to Financial Choice

By Sandro Ambuehl, B. Douglas Bernheim, and Annamaria Lusardi

American Economic Review, November 2022

We examine methods for evaluating interventions designed to improve decision-making quality when people misunderstand the consequences of their choices. In an experiment involving financial education, conventional outcome metrics (financial literacy and d...

Immigration and Spatial Equilibrium: The Role of Expenditures in the Country of Origin

By Christoph Albert and Joan Monras

American Economic Review, November 2022

We document that international migrants concentrate more in expensive cities—the more so, the lower the prices in their origin countries are—and consume less locally than comparable natives. We rationalize this empirical evidence by introducing a quan...

The Psychosocial Value of Employment: Evidence from a Refugee Camp

By Reshmaan Hussam, Erin M. Kelley, Gregory Lane, and Fatima Zahra

American Economic Review, November 2022

Employment may be important to well-being for reasons beyond its role as an income source. This paper presents a causal estimate of the psychosocial value of employment in refugee camps in Bangladesh. We involve 745 individuals in a field experiment with ...

Predistribution vs redistribution

[Page]

Why is income inequality higher in the United States than in Europe?

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

A Theory of One-Size-Fits-All Recommendations

By Doron Levit and Anton Tsoy

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

One-size-fits-all recommendations are common in many contexts, including those with a widespread heterogeneity. We propose a model that rationalizes this phenomenon. An expert recommends publicly to two agents whether to adopt a policy. The expert is priv...

Voting Agendas and Preferences on Trees: Theory and Practice

By Andreas Kleiner and Benny Moldovanu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We study how parliaments and committees select one out of several alternatives when options cannot be ordered along a "left-right" axis. Which voting agendas are used in practice, and how should they be designed? We assume that preferences are single peak...

Robust Minimal Instability of the Top Trading Cycles Mechanism

By Battal Doğan and Lars Ehlers

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

In the context of priority-based allocation of objects, we formulate methods to compare assignments in terms of their stability. We introduce three basic properties that a reasonable stability comparison should satisfy. We show that for any stability comp...

On the Foundations of Ex Post Incentive-Compatible Mechanisms

By Takuro Yamashita and Shuguang Zhu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

This paper considers an interdependent-value robust mechanism design problem, where the principal has little knowledge about the agent's belief. Although ex post incentive-compatible (EPIC) mechanisms can implement allocations without any knowledge about ...

Accountability and Grand Corruption

By Cesar Martinelli

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We propose a model of political careers and electoral accountability in an environment in which politicians may take bribes at different stages of their careers and in which politicians' actions are only imperfectly observed by voters. We show that the ex...

Too Much Data: Prices and Inefficiencies in Data Markets

By Daron Acemoglu, Ali Makhdoumi, Azarakhsh Malekian, and Asu Ozdaglar

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

When a user shares her data with online platforms, she reveals information about others. In such a setting, externalities depress the price of data because once a user's information is leaked by others, she has less reason to protect her data and privacy....

Deposit Requirements in Auctions

By Xiaogang Che, Tong Li, Jingfeng Lu, and Xiaoyong Zheng

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We examine optimal auction design when buyers may receive future outside offers. The winning bidder may choose to default upon observing her outside offer. Under the optimal mechanism, the bidder with the highest value wins if and only if her value is abo...

What Should a Firm Know? Protecting Consumers' Privacy Rents

By Daniel Bird and Zvika Neeman

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

A monopolistic firm observes a signal about the state of the world and then makes a take-it-or-leave-it offer to an uninformed consumer who has recourse to some outside option. We provide a geometric characterization of the firm's information structure th...

Auction Mechanisms and Treasury Revenue: Evidence from the Chinese Experiment

By Klenio Barbosa, Dakshina G. De Silva, Liyu Yang, and Hisayuki Yoshimoto

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

This paper exploits a large-scale auction experiment conducted by two Chinese government treasury security issuers—the Chinese Development Bank and the Export-Import Bank—to investigate whether treasury securities should be sold through uniform price ...

Reporting Sexual Misconduct in the #MeToo Era

By Ing-Haw Cheng and Alice Hsiaw

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We model the reporting of sexual misconduct. Individuals underreport misconduct due to strategic uncertainty over whether others will report and corroborate a pattern of behavior. Underreporting occurs if and only if misconduct is widespread. Making sanct...

Transition Dynamics in Equilibrium Search

By Ş. Nuray Akın and Brennan C. Platt

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We study a dynamic equilibrium search model where sellers differ in their urgency to liquidate an asset. Buyers strategically make price offers without knowing a given seller's urgency. We study liquidity and price dynamics on the transition path after an...

Disclosure and Favoritism in Sequential Elimination Contests

By Qiang Fu and Zenan Wu

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

We consider a two-stage contest, in which only a subset of contestants enters the finale. We explore the optimal policy for disclosing contestants' interim status after the preliminary round, i.e., their interim ranking and elimination decision. The optim...

Expectations-Based Loss Aversion May Help Explain Seemingly Dominated Choices in Strategy-Proof Mechanisms

By Bnaya Dreyfuss, Ori Heffetz, and Matthew Rabin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

Deferred acceptance (DA), a widely implemented algorithm, is meant to improve allocations: under classical preferences, it induces preference-concordant rankings. However, recent evidence shows that—in both real, large-stakes applications and experiment...

The Effect of Sequentiality on Cooperation in Repeated Games

By Riccardo Ghidoni and Sigrid Suetens

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

Sequentiality of moves in an infinitely repeated prisoner's dilemma does not change the conditions under which mutual cooperation can be supported in equilibrium relative to simultaneous decision-making. The nature of the interaction is different, however...

Screening Dominance: A Comparison of Noisy Signals

By David Lagziel and Ehud Lehrer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, November 2022

This paper studies the impact of noisy signals on screening processes. It deals with a decision problem in which a decision-maker screens a set of elements based on noisy unbiased evaluations. Given that the decision-maker uses threshold strategies, we sh...