When groups face difficult problems, the voice of experts may be lost in the noise of others' contributions. We present results from a 'naturally noisy' setting, a large first-year undergraduate class, in which the 'expert's voice is lost' to such a degree that it is in fact optimal for all...

This paper examines the legal and policy implications of information asymmetry on foreign domestic workers employed under the Kafala sponsorship system in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. Drawing from ethnographic and field-based observations in large GCC migrant destinations -...

This paper is concerned with empirical and theoretical basis of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). The paper begins with an overview of the statistical properties of asset returns at different frequencies (daily, weekly and monthly), and considers the evidence on return predictability, risk...

By allowing for imperfectly informed markets and the role of private information, we offer new insights about observed deviations of portfolio concentrations in domestic relative to foreign risky assets, or "home bias", from what standard finance models predict. Our model ascribes the "bias" to...

The Australian Government launched the My School website in 2010 to provide standardised information about the quality of schools to the Australian public. This paper combines data from this website with home sales data for the state of Victoria to estimate the effect of the publication of...

We design an experiment to test the hypothesis that, in violation of Bayes Rule, some people respond more forcefully to the strength of information than to its weight. We provide incentives to motivate effort, use naturally occurring information, and control for risk attitude. We find that the...

This paper studies the influence of information on entry choices in a competition with a controlled laboratory experiment. We investigate whether information provision attracts mainly high productivity individuals and reduces competition failure, where competition failure occurs when a subject...

We consider an economy where individuals privately choose effort and trade competitively priced securities that pay off with effort-determined probability. We show that if insurance against a negative shock is sufficiently incomplete, then standard functional form restrictions ensure that...

We run a field experiment to investigate whether competing in rank-order tournaments with different prize spreads affects individual performance. Our experiment involved students from an Italian University who took an intermediate exam in which one part was awarded on the basis of their relative...

This paper analyses the welfare effects of price restrictions on private contracting in a world where agents have a limited cognitive ability. People compute the costs and benefits of entering a transaction with an error. The government knows the distribution of true costs and benefits as well...