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

We analyze a class of sender-receiver games with quadratic payoffs, which includes the communication games in Alonso, Dessein and Matouschek (2008) and Rantakari (2008) as special cases, for which the receiver's maximum expected payoff when players have access to arbitrary, mediated...

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...

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...

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...

Do wealth shocks affect the health of the elderly in developed countries? The economic literature is skeptical about such effects which have so far only been found for poor retirees in poor countries. In this paper I show that wealth shocks also matter for the health of wealthy retirees in the...