Subjects who overestimate their performance in experimental tasks unrelated to travel are less willing to insure against failing in the task and also less inclined to buy travel insurance. This suggests intrinsic optimism influences insurance demand and diminishes adverse selection

I present a model of social learning over an exogenous, directed network that may be readily nested within broader macroeconomic models with dispersed information and combines the attributes that agents (a) act repeatedly and simultaneously; (b) are Bayes-rational; and (c) have strategic...

In this paper I analyze how careerist decision makers aggregate and use information provided by others. I find that decision makers who are motivated by reputation concerns tend to ‘anti-herding’, i.e., they excessively contradict public information such as the prior or others’...

This paper presents a pairwise matching model with two-sided information asymmetry to analyse the impact of information costs on endogenous network building and matching by information intermediaries. The framework innovates by examining the role of information costs on incentives for trade...

A two-sided, pair-wise matching model is developed to analyse the strategic interaction between two information intermediaries who compete in commission rates and network size, giving rise to a fragmented duopoly market structure. The model suggests that network competition between information...

In this paper I analyse the strategic interaction of decision makers and their advisers in a consultation process. I find that when agents are concerned about their reputation, consultation results in sub-optimal sharing of information; some decision makers may deliberately act unilaterally and...

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the...

How does transparency, a key feature of central bank design, affect the deliberation of monetary policymakers? We exploit a natural experiment in the Federal Open Market Committee in 1993 together with computational linguistic models (particularly Latent Dirichlet Allocation) to measure the...

This paper tests various hypotheses about distributive politics by studying the distribution of federal spending across U.S. states over the period 1978-2002. We improve on previous work by using survey data to measure the share of voters in each state that are Democrats, Republicans, and...

I analyze a dataset of news from the New York Times, from 1946 to 1997. Controlling for the incumbent President's activity across issues, I find that during the presidential campaign the New York Times gives more emphasis to topics that are owned by the Democratic party (civil rights, health...