We study student loan behavior in the Netherlands where (i) higher education students know little about the conditions of the government's financial aid program and (ii) take-up rates are low. In a field experiment we manipulated the amount of information students have about these conditions....

This paper offers an informational explanation for asset price booms and crashes. If market fundamentals change, but the length of this process of change is unknown, market participants try to learn about it by observing market outcomes. This learning generates a boom and a crash, which we call...

We study a model of strategic persuasion based on the theory of cheap talk, in which a better-informed agent manipulates two decision-makers’ joint decision on alternative proposals. With the heterogeneity of two decision-makers’ value of the outside option, only the decision-maker with the...

We model strategic mediation of the communication between an informed expert with a discrete type space and an uninformed decision maker. A strategic mediator can improve communication even when he is biased into the same direction as the expert.

This paper studies the effect of information about a charity’s size on individuals’ donations to that charity. We conducted a framed field experiment with a non-student sample, in which subjects had the opportunity to donate to various charitable causes. The results show that if subjects are...

This paper proves the Li (2009) [13] unawareness structure equivalent to the single-agent propositionally generated logic of awareness of Fagin and Halpern (1988) [4]. For any model of one type one can construct a model of the other type describing the same belief and awareness. Li starts from...

We design and conduct a field experiment in which treated subjects receive a precise and objective signal regarding their knowledge about a public good before estimating their WTP for it. We find that the causal effect of objective signals about the accuracy of a subject׳s knowledge for a...

When we become aware that our past actions carry information about qualities that we possess or lack, which others use to decide how to deal with us, are we unconcerned, content to rely on what we have done, or do we take action to alter this information? We study this question experimentally...

We analyze how a benevolent, privately informed government agency would optimally release information about the economy׳s growth rate when the agents hold heterogeneous beliefs. We model two types of agent: “conforming” and “dissenting.” The former has a prior that is identical to that...