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...

As technology continues to innovate at lightning speeds and technology becomes more central to everyday life, personal data must be protected. In 2017, the passage of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the European Union set an important precedent in the world of data protection...

Information unraveling is an elegant theoretical argument suggesting that private information may be fully and voluntarily surrendered. The experimental literature has, however, failed to provide evidence of complete unraveling and has suggested senders' limited depth of reasoning as one...

We study a game in which two firms compete in quality to serve a market consisting of consumers with different initial consideration sets. If both firms invest below a certain threshold, they only compete for those consumers already aware of their existence. Above this threshold, a firm is...

For the Euro 2000 Soccer Championships an experimental asset market was conducted, with traders buying and selling contracts on the winners of individual matches. Market-generated probabilites are compared to professional bet quotas, and factors that are responsible for the quality of the market...

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...

Products produced by a multiproduct firm can be linked through demand linkages or supply linkages. On the demand side, changes in the price of one product can affect the demand for a firm's other products through shifts in consumer expenditures. This is commonly referred to as the...