Congress enacted The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 over the protests of small business advocates who claimed that the ADA would trigger a wave of bankruptcies. Although the profitability of firms may suffer from the costs of ADA compliance, no systematic evidence is available. This...

This paper studies the design of law-making and law enforcement institutions based on the premise that law is inherently incomplete. Under incomplete law, law enforcement by courts may suffer from deterrence failure, defined as the socialwelfare loss that results from the regime's inability to...

We use household survey data to construct a direct measure of absolute risk aversion based on the maximum price a consumer is willing to pay to buy a risky asset. We relate this measure to a set of consumers' decisions that in theory should vary with attitude towards risk. We find that elicited...

Theories on the formation of information cascades have been tested in experimental settings in which players publicly announce binary expectations of a binary event based on private signals and preceding public announcements. We replicate and supplement the experimental data collection by...

This paper introduces a tractable, structural model of subjective beliefs. Since agents that plan for the future care about expected future utility flows, current felicity can be increased by believing that better outcomes are more likely. On the other hand, expectations that are biased towards...

We examine an economy in which the cost of consuming some goods can be reduced by making commitments to consumption levels that do not vary across states. For example, moral hazard and matching considerations may make it cheaper to produce housing services via owner-occupied than rented housing,...

This paper studies how the arrival of more precise information affects welfare in an economy with incomplete and differential information. We consider a single period, pure exchange economy with aggregate uncertainty in which agents show different attitudes towards risk: wealthy individuals are...

I argue in favor of a competitive screening approach for studying the question of coalition formation in exchange economies under asymmetric information. I obtain a new notion of core that refines Wilson (1978)'s coarse core. It is nonempty under the standard regularity conditions. I also...

This paper analyzes a bilateral trade problem where the seller makes hidden investment that influences the buyer's private valuation. Complete contracts can be written on observable trade decisions. It is shown that efficiency level in investment and trade is negatively related to the scope of...

This paper reports a laboratory experiment to study pricing and advertising behavior in a market with costly buyer search. Sellers simultaneously post prices and decide whether or not to incur an exogenous cost to advertise their price. Sellers are not capacity constrained, and each buyer...