Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset...

We report a large-scale randomized controlled trial designed to assess whether the partisan cue of a provaccine message from Donald Trump would induce Americans to get COVID-19 vaccines. Our study involved presenting a 27-second advertisement to millions of U.S. YouTube users in October 2021....

Markets with asymmetric information will often employ third-party certification labels to distinguish between higher and lower quality transactions, yet little is known about the effects of certification policies on the evolution of markets. How does the stringency in quality certification...

We study the effect of price salience on whether a product is purchased and, conditional on purchase, the quality purchased. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, we find that making the full purchase price salient to consumers reduces both the quality and quantity of goods purchased. The...

Bargaining breakdown--whether as delay, conflict, or missing trade--plagues bargaining in environments with incomplete information. Can a bargaining environment that facilitates or restricts communication alleviate these costs? We exploit a unique opportunity to study this question using real...

How much do a manager's interpersonal skills with subordinates, which we call people management skills, affect employee outcomes? Are managers rewarded for having such skills? Using personnel data from a large, high-tech firm, we show that survey-measured people management skills have a strong...

We study patterns of behavior in bilateral bargaining situations using a rich, new dataset describing over 88 million listings from eBay's Best Offer platform, with back-and-forth bargaining occurring in over 25 million of these listings. We document patterns of behavior and relate them to...

In complex environments, it is challenging to learn enough about the underlying characteristics of transactions so as to design the best institutions to efficiently generate gains from trade. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has emerged as an important tool that allows market designers...

We study expectation-based reference point formation using data from an online auction marketplace. We hypothesize that exit from the marketplace is affected by disappointment from abruptly losing an auction after being the leading bidder. Expectation-based reference points that evolve over time...

This paper estimates how overall consumer spending responds to changes in gasoline prices. It uses the differential impact across consumers of the sudden, large drop in gasoline prices in 2014 for identification. This estimation strategy is implemented using comprehensive, high-frequency...