As illicit substances move into the legal product space, substitution patterns with legal products become more salient. In particular, marijuana legalization may have implications for the use of other legal "sin" goods. We estimate a structural model of multi-product use of illegal and legal...

Unfavorable news are often delivered under the disguise of vagueness. Our theory-driven laboratory experiment investigates this strategic use of vagueness in voluntary disclosure and asks whether there is scope for policy to improve information transmission. We find that vagueness is profitably...

The question of whether two drugs - namely alcohol and tobacco - are used as complements or substitutes is of crucial interest if side-effects of anti-smoking policies are considered. Numerous papers have empirically addressed this issue by estimating demand systems for alcohol and tobacco and...

Platforms often display their products ahead of third-party products in search. Is this due to consumers preferring platform-owned products or platforms engaging in self-preferencing by biasing search towards their own products? What are the welfare implications? I develop a structural model of...

We broaden and develop the classic captive-and-shopper model of sales. Firstly, we allow for asymmetric marginal costs as well as asymmetric captive audiences. These asymmetries jointly determine the identities of the two or more firms we find compete (via randomized sales) to serve shoppers. In...

In markets with quality unobservable to buyers, third-party certification is often the only instrument to increase transparency. While both sellers and buyers have a demand for certification, its role differs fundamentally: sellers use it for signaling, buyers use it for inspection. Seller...

This paper analyzes optimal product lines when consumers differ both in their taste for quality and in their desire for social image. The market outcome features partial pooling and product differentiation that is not driven by heterogeneous valuations for quality but by image concerns. A...

We investigate the achievement impact of alternative uses of student assessments. Our dataset covers over 2 million students in 59 countries observed over 6 waves in the international PISA test 2000-2015. Our empirical model exploits the country panel dimension to investigate assessment reforms...

I study a cheap talk model between a buyer and a seller with two goods for sale. There is two-sided (independent) private information with sequential, two-way communication. In the first stage, the buyer communicates her private preferences to the seller. In the second stage, the seller...