This paper studies the decentralized adoption of a technology standard when network effects are present. If the new standard is incompatible with the current installed base, adoption may be inefficiently delayed. I quantify the magnitude of "excess inertia" in the switch of the movie...

The emergence of online providers aggregating illegal content from streaming platforms is rekindling the debate about online piracy. In the past, the discussion mainly focused on the impact of piracy in content industries and the effect of anti-piracy measures. But little is known about one...

In the expected-utility theory of the monetary value of a statistical life, the so-called dead-anyway effect discovered by Pratt and Zeckhauser (1996) asserts that an individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) for small reductions in mortality risk increases with the initial level of risk. Their...

Discounting future costs and benefits is a crucial yet contentious practice in the appraisal of long-term public projects with environmental consequences. The standard approach typically neglects that ecosystem services are not easily substitutable with manufactured goods and often exhibit...

Researchers frequently use variants of the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) mechanism to elicit willingness to pay (WTP). These variants involve numerous incentive-irrelevant design choices, some of which carry advantages for implementation but may deteriorate participant comprehension or trust in...

We examine the presence of a systematic preference for independent living at old age which we refer as "institutionalization aversion" (IA). Given that IA is not observable from revealed preferences, we draw on a survey experiment to elicit individuals' willingness to pay (WTP) to avoid...

In this study, the real demand for global and local environmental protection in Beijing, China, is elicited and investigated. Participants from Beijing were offered the opportunity to contribute to voluntary climate change mitigation by purchasing permits from two Chinese CO2 emissions trading...

Willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) a monetary amount for a lottery should be closely related. In data from an incentivized survey of a representative sample of 3,000 U.S. adults, we find that WTA and WTP for a lottery are, at best, weakly correlated. Across all respondents,...

We study market rents in the neighborhood of asylum seeker hosting centers. Our empirical setting exploits the quasi-random opening of centers and spatial allocation of asylum seekers in Switzerland. Rents within 0.7km of an active center are found on average to be 3.8% lower than rents in the...