This paper shows that accounting for variation in mistakes can be crucial for welfare analysis. Focusing on consumer underreaction to not-fully-salient sales taxes, we show theoretically that the efficiency costs of taxation are amplified by differences in underreaction across individuals and...

How should policymakers disseminate information: by broadcasting it widely (e.g., via mass media), or letting word spread from a small number of initially informed "seed" individuals? While conventional wisdom suggests delivering information more widely is better, we show theoretically and...

This paper studies a field experiment among energy-intensive Indian manufacturing plants that offered energy consulting to raise energy productivity, the amount plants can produce with each unit of energy. Treatment plants, after two years and relative to the control, run longer hours, demand...

Performance pay for teachers is frequently suggested as a way of improving education outcomes in schools, but the theoretical predictions regarding its effectiveness are ambiguous and the empirical evidence to date is limited and mixed. We present results from a randomized evaluation of a...

A set of randomized experiments shed light on how markets and information influence household decisions to adopt nutritional innovations. Of 400 Indian villages, we randomly assigned half to an intervention where all shopkeepers were offered the option to sell a new salt, fortified with both...

Absence of well-functioning formal institutions leads to reliance on social networks to enforce informal contracts. Social ties may aid cooperation, but agents vary in network centrality, and this hierarchy may hinder cooperation. To assess the extent to which networks substitute for...