This paper studies the causal effect of providing information about climate changeon individuals’ willingness to pay to offset carbon emissions in a randomizedcontrol trial. Receiving truthful information about ways to reduce CO2 emis-sions increases individuals’ willingness to pay for CO2...

This paper studies the causal effect of providing information about climate change on individuals' willingness to pay to offset carbon emissions in a randomized control trial. Receiving truthful information about ways to reduce CO2 emissions increases individuals' willingness to pay for CO2...

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...

We consider a monopolistic certifier selling certification services to a partially privately informed seller. The certifier can enable the seller to disclose her private information publicly, as well as gather additional market information about the good's quality publicly. We show that the...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumerś problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort and...

We investigate the elasticity of moral ignorance with respect to monetary incentives and social norm information. We propose that individuals suffer from higher moral costs when rejecting a certain donation, and thus pay for moral ignorance. Consistent with our model, we find significant...

Traditionally, economic models have attributed procrastination to present bias. However, procrastination may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding motivated, overly optimistic beliefs about the workload they need to complete. This study provides a rigorous...

Consumers can acquire information through their own search efforts or through their social network. Information diffusion via word-of-mouth communication leads to some consumers free-riding on their “friends” and less information acquisition via active search. Free-riding also has an...

This paper analyzes the main uncertainty of college saving - the child’s ability - in the context of the saving with learning model. The first section develops a dynamic model combining asset accumulation and learning to explain the parents’ forward-looking saving behavior when they are...