Cognitive Economics is the economics of what is in people's minds. It is a vibrant area of research (much of it within Behavioral Economics, Labor Economics and the Economics of Education) that brings into play novel types of data--especially novel types of survey data. Such data highlight the...

Precision medicines inherently fragment treatment populations, generating small-population markets, creating high-priced "niche busters" rather than broadly prescribed "blockbusters". It is plausible to expect that small markets will attract limited entry in which a small number of...

Societies under similar geographic and economic conditions and subject to similar external influences nonetheless develop very different types of states. At one extreme are weak states with little capacity and ability to regulate economic or social relations. At the other are despotic states...

Theorists and policy analysts have convincingly argued that greater trust makes a more efficient society by eliminating costly contracts or expensive reputations. Concurrently, experiments suggest that reciprocity is a potent substitute for law when compliance with contracts is imperfectly...

Novel empirical insights by their very nature tend to be unanticipated, and in some cases at odds with the current state of knowledge on the topic. The mechanics of statistical inference suggest that such initial findings, even when robust and statistically significant within the study, should...

We characterize the entire set of linear equilibria of beauty contest games under general information structures. In particular, we focus on equilibria in which sentiments, that is self-fulfilling changes in beliefs that are orthogonal to fundamentals and exogenous noise, can drive aggregate...

The decision to protest is strategic: an individual's participation is a function of her beliefs about others' turnout. Models of protest often assume strategic complementarity; however, the challenge of collective action suggests strategic substitutability. We conduct the first field experiment...

Firms sometimes comply with externality-correcting policies by gaming the measure that determines policy. We show theoretically that such gaming can benefit consumers, even when it induces them to make mistakes, because gaming leads to lower prices by reducing costs. We use our insights to...

This paper presents and structurally estimates a model of endogenous network formation and legislative activity of career-motivated politicians. Employing data on socialization and legislative effort of members of the 105th-110th U.S. Congresses, our model reconciles a set of empirical...

This paper studies how interest groups allocate campaign contributions when congressmen are connected by social ties. We establish conditions for the existence of a unique Nash equilibrium in pure strategies for the contribution game and characterize the associated allocation of the interest...