Report of the Secretary for 2003

American Economic Review, May 2004

Report of the Secretary for 2004

American Economic Review, May 2005

Thank-you calls and donor retention

[Page]

Does calling donors to thank them for their contributions increase the likelihood of future donations?

Call for Papers: Los Angeles Annual Business Research Conference 2024

[News]

April 25, 2023

The deadline for submissions is September 8, 2023.

Call for Papers: 3rd International Conference on Econometrics and Business Analytics (iCEBA) 2023

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April 25, 2023

The deadline for submissions is June 1, 2023.

Front Matter

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

At the Helm, Kirk or Spock? The Pros and Cons of Charismatic Leadership

By Benjamin E. Hermalin

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

Charismatic leaders are often desired. At the same time, experience, especially with demagogues, as well as social science studies, raise doubts about such leaders. This paper offers explanations for charismatic leadership's "mixed report card." It offers...

Learning by Choosing: Career Concerns with Observable Actions

By T. Tony Ke, Christopher Li, and Mikhail Safronov

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

This paper explores potential inefficiencies of incomplete contracts in a dynamic career concerns context. In a firm-worker relationship, the worker performs public tasks that have trade-offs between productivity and informativeness. We show that the firs...

Relative Wealth Concerns, Executive Compensation, and Managerial Risk-Taking

By Qi Liu and Bo Sun

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

This paper theoretically examines how relative wealth concerns affect equilibrium contracting and systemic risk-taking. We find that such externalities can generate pay for luck as an equilibrium strategy. In expectation of pay for luck in other firms, ty...

Too Good to Be True? Retention Rules for Noisy Agents

By Francisco Espinosa ⓡ Debraj Ray

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

An agent who privately knows his type seeks to be retained by a principal. Agents signal their type with some ambient noise, but can alter this noise, perhaps at some cost. Our main finding is that in equilibrium, the principal treats extreme signals in e...

Targeted Product Design

By Heski Bar-Isaac, Guillermo Caruana, and Vicente Cuñat

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We propose an intuitive representation of product design in which firms locate inside a circle and consumers in its outer circumference. Designs trade off horizontal and vertical transport costs. Our setting encompasses all linear demand rotations. Firms ...

Biased Beliefs in Search Markets

By Tobias Gamp and Daniel Krähmer

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We study the implications of biased consumer beliefs for search market outcomes in the seminal framework due to Diamond (1971). Biased consumers base their search strategy on a belief function that specifies for any (true) distribution of utility offers i...

Reference Dependence and Attribution Bias: Evidence from Real-Effort Experiments

By Benjamin Bushong and Tristan Gagnon-Bartsch

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We document a form of attribution bias wherein people wrongly ascribe sensations of positive or negative surprise to the underlying disutility of a real-effort task. Participants in our experiments learned from experience about two unfamiliar tasks, one m...

Complexity and Procedural Choice

By James Banovetz and Ryan Oprea

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, May 2023

We test the core ideas of the "automata" approach to bounded rationality, using simple experimental bandit tasks. Optimality requires subjects to use a moderately complex decision procedure, but most subjects in our baseline condition instead use simpler ...

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...