What are the implications of rational inattention for the effects of public information on individual behavior and in turn welfare? I examine the impact of rational inattention to public information in the "beauty contest" model of Morris and Shin (2002). I show that with information processing...

We examine the welfare costs of informed trade in a new sequential trade model with elastic uninformed traders. Welfare losses occur when the liquidity costs of executing a trade exceed the potential gains from the trade. With long-lived private information, more informed traders lead to better...

A nudge is a non-coercive paternalistic intervention that attempts to improve choices by manipulating the framing of a decision problem. As any paternalism, it faces the difficulty of determining the appropriate welfare criterion. We propose a welfare-theoretic foundation for nudging similar in...

I demonstrate a straightforward but apparently widely unrecognized implication of the standard requirements for perfect competition: an economy in which consumers can choose to learn is generally not perfectly competitive. In particular, if endogenous welfare relevant learning is feasible, the...

A nudge is a paternalistic government intervention that attempts to improve choices by changing the framing of a decision problem. We propose a welfare- theoretic foundation for nudging similar in spirit to the classical revealed preference approach, by investigating a model where preferences...

The model of public policy studied in this paper has heterogeneous citizens/voters and two public goods: one (roads) chosen directly by an elected policy-maker, and the other (pollution) stochastically dependent on the amount of roads. Both a one-country and a two-country version of the model...

This paper studies a model of public policy with heterogenous citizens/voters and two public goods: One (roads) is chosen directly by an elected policymaker, and the other (pollution) depends stochastically on the amount of roads. Both a one-country and a two-country version of the model are...