In order to induce farmers to adopt a productive new agricultural technology, we apply simple and complex contagion diffusion models on rich social network data from 200 villages in Malawi to identify seed farmers to target and train on the new technology. A randomized controlled trial compares...

We document that the nature of business cycles evolves over the process of development and structural change. In countries with large declining agricultural sectors, aggregate employment is uncorrelated with GDP.During booms, employment in agriculture declines while labor productivity increases...

In a series of papers, Martin Weitzman has proposed a Dismal Theorem. The general idea is that, under limited conditions concerning the structure of uncertainty and preferences, society has an indefinitely large expected loss from high-consequence, low-probability events. Under such conditions,...

Learning or experience curves are widely used to estimate cost functions in manufacturing modeling. They have recently been introduced in policy models of energy and global warming economics to make the process of technological change endogenous. It is not widely appreciated that this is a...

We define a notion of correlated equilibrium for games with incomplete information in a general setting with finite players, finite actions, and finite states, which we call Bayes correlated equilibrium. The set of Bayes correlated equilibria of a fixed incomplete information game equals the set...

A universal type space of interdependent expected utility preference types is constructed from higher-order preference hierarchies describing (i) an agent's (unconditional) preferences over a lottery space; (ii) the agent's preference over Anscombe-Aumann acts conditional on the unconditional...

This note constructs an efficient mechanism for finding the best candidate for a committee from a sequence of potential candidates. Committee members have independent private values information about the quality of the candidate. The mechanism selects the best candidate according to the standard...

We survey the recent literature on designing auctions and mechanisms for dynamic settings. Two settings are considered: those with a dynamic population of agents whose private information remains fixed throughout time; and those with a fixed population of agents whose private information changes...

We develop a model with many heterogeneous advertisers (products) and advertising markets (media). Each advertiser has a different consumer segment for its product, and each medium has a different ability to target advertisement messages. We characterize the competitive equilibrium in the media...

We consider the implementation of social choice functions under complete information in rationalizable strategies. A strict (and thus stronger) version of the monotonicity condition introduced by Maskin (1999) is necessary under the solution concept of rationalizability. Assuming the social...