This paper examines how providing better information to customs inspectors and monitoring their actions affects tax revenue and fraud detection in Madagascar. First, an instrumental variables strategy is used to show that transaction-specific, third-party valuation advice on a subset of...

We conduct a survey experiment on the effect of information provision on attitudes towards immigration in Germany. The focus lies on two theory-based economic channels, labor market and welfare state concerns, and immigration policy preferences. Using probability-based representative survey...

We conduct a large-scale field experiment in the German labor market to investigate how information provision affects job seekers' employment prospects and labor market outcomes. Individuals assigned to the treatment group of our experiment received a brochure that informed them about job search...

We leverage the small open economy Switzerland as a testing ground for basic premises of macroeconomic models of endogenous information acquisition, using tailored surveys of firms and households. First, we show that firms perceive a greater exposure to exchange rate movements than households,...

Many committees - juries, political task forces, etc. - spend time gathering costly information before reaching a decision. We report results from lab experiments focused on such information-collection processes. We consider decisions governed by individuals and groups and compare how voting...

When voters' trust in politicians collapses, they demand simple policies that they can easily monitor. Disenchanted citizens therefore prefer committed delegates to politicians who propose themselves as competent policy makers but without a specific policy commitment (trustees). In a two-party...

We conduct a field experiment on a movie-recommendation platform to identify if and how recommendations affect consumption. We use within-consumer randomization at the good level and elicit beliefs about unconsumed goods to disentangle exposure from informational effects. We find recommendations...

We develop a theory of conversations. Two agents with different interests take turns choosing the topic of the conversation. Talking about a single topic allows them to delve deeper, making the conversation more informative (or enjoyable). To capture this dynamic, we assume that the marginal...

Risk-neutral individuals take more risky decisions when they have limited liability. Risk-neutral managers may not when acting as agents under contract and taking costly actions to acquire information before taking decisions. Limited liability makes it optimal to increase the reward for outcomes...

Most studies of gender discrimination consider how male versus female candidates are assessed given otherwise identical information about them. But, in many settings of interest, evaluators have a choice about how much information to acquire about a candidate before making a final assessment. We...