This paper documents the delayed adoption of a major technological innovation: the adoption of the diesel locomotive in the US railway industry. Contrary to other instances of major technological innovations, the delay in the adoption of the diesel locomotive was not associated with an initial...

There is increasing research on the exogenous impact of descriptive social norms on economic behavior. The research to date has a number of limitations: 1) it has not de-coupled the impact of the norm and the knowledge required to understand how to change behavior based upon it; 2) it has...

The amount of political information that voters decide to acquire during an electoral campaign depends, among other things, on prior ideological beliefs about parties and/or candidates. Voters that are ex ante indifferent about the candidates attach little value to information because they...

The most usual procedure when facing decisions in complex settings consists in consulting experts, aggregating the information they provide, and deciding on the basis of this aggregated information. We argue that such a procedure entails a substantial loss, insofar as it precludes the...

We study the decision of when to invest in an indivisible project whose value is perfectly observable but driven by a parameter that is unknown to the decision maker ex ante. This problem is equivalent to an optimal stopping problem for a bivariate Markov process. Using filtering and martingale...

Many firms encourage employees to own company stock through share plans that subsidizethe price at favorable rates, but even so many employees do not buy shares. Using a newsurvey of employees in a multinational with a share ownership plan, we find considerablevariation in joining among...

Reduced- form tests of scale effects in markets with search, run when aggregate matching functions are estimated, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. A semi-structural model is developed and estimated on a British sample, testing for...

A number of recent formal models predict a positive effect of political knowledge on turnout. Both information acquisition and turnout, however, are likely to be determined by a similar set of variables, rendering hard the identification of a causal link in empirical investigations. Available...

We study the evolution of prices in a symmetric duopoly where firms are uncertain about the degree of product differentiation. Customers sometimes perceive the products as close substitutes, sometimes as highly differentiated. Firms learn about their competitive environment from the quantities...

Reduced-form tests of scale effects in markets with search, based on aggregate matching functions, may miss important scale effects at the micro level, because of the reactions of job searchers. We estimate a semi-structural model on a British sample of unemployed people, testing for scale...