Cellular telephone is an example of a new product that has significantly affected how Americans live. Since their introduction in 1983, cellular telephone adoption has grown at 25-35% per year such that at year end 1996 about 42 million cellular telephones are in use in the U.S. However,...

We report the results from a field experiment with a micro lender in Uganda to test the effectiveness of privately implemented incentives for loan repayment. Using a randomized control trial we measure the impact of three different treatments: Borrowers are either given a lump sum cash reward...

Mobile money is a tool that allows individuals to make financial transactions using cell phone technology. In this paper, we report initial results of two rounds of a large survey of households in Kenya, the country that has seen perhaps the most rapid and widespread growth of a mobile money...

The US mobile phone service industry has dramatically consolidated over the last two decades. One justification for consolidation is that merged firms can provide consumers with larger coverage areas at lower costs. We estimate the willingness to pay for national coverage to evaluate this...

Information is a crucial ingredient in economic decision making. Yet measuring the extent of information exchange among individuals and its effect on economic outcomes is a difficult task. We use the universe of de-identified cellphone usage records from more than one million users in a Chinese...

In this paper, we use mobile messaging to leverage recipients' social ties and encourage offline prosocial activities in groups. In particular, we conduct a randomized field experiment with 80,000 blood donors and study how behavioral interventions and economic rewards motivate offline group...

The combinatorial clock auction is becoming increasingly popular for large-scale spectrum awards and other uses, replacing more traditional ascending or clock auctions. We describe some surprising properties of the auction, including a wide range of ex post equilibria with demand expansion,...

In complex environments, it is challenging to learn enough about the underlying characteristics of transactions so as to design the best institutions to efficiently generate gains from trade. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has emerged as an important tool that allows market designers...

This paper measures for the first time the economic efficiency effects of the taxation of wireless services, which are taxed by federal, state, and local governments at relatively high rates in the range of 14%-25%. The paper concludes such taxes are a much greater drain on the economy than...