Dual-process theories view decisions as the result of the interaction of two qualitatively different types of processes, automatic/impulsive and controlled/deliberative. This paper considers a model of self-control where each decision can be taken by either an automatic process or a deliberative...

Economists usually think that rational voters have little incentives to acquire costly information. We present a theoretical model to show that, in contrast to this widely held belief, rational voters acquire considerable amounts of information if media technology is available because then they...

We rationalize a special type of sharing information which can typically be found in markets for occupational disability insurances. There, firms share information about acceptances and rejections of an applicant. We set up a multiple-step signalling model with uninformed agents and endogenize...

On average, young people underestimate whereas old people overestimate their chances to survive into the future. We employ a subjective survival belief model proposed by Ludwig and Zimper (2013), which can replicate these patterns. The model is compared with hyperbolic discounting within a...

We examine empirically whether individuals evaluating used cars efficiently aggregate all relevant information on its constituent characteristics. Based on detailed field data on more than 80,000 used car offers in a large online marketplace, we provide evidence for biased information...

We present a model of opinion formation where individuals repeatedly engage in discussion and update their opinion in a social network similarly to the DeGroot model. Abstracting from the standard assumption that individuals always report their opinion truthfully, agents in our model may state...

In this paper we make use of a quasi-experiment in the market for illegal downloading to study movie box office revenues. Exogenous variation comes from the unexpected shutdown of the popular file hosting platform Megaupload.com on January 19, 2012. The estimation strategy is based on a quasi...

We analyze dynamic price competition in a homogeneous goods duopoly, where consumers exchange information via word-of-mouth communication. A fraction of consumers, who do not learn any new information, remain locked-in at their previous supplier in each period. We analyze Markov perfect...