Consumer review websites leverage the wisdom of the crowd, with each product being reviewed many times (some with more than 1,000 reviews). Because of this, the way in which information is aggregated is a central decision faced by consumer review websites. Given a set of reviews, what is the...

This paper examines reputation formation in intra-familial interactions. We consider parental reputation in a repeated two-stage game in which adolescents decide whether to give a teen birth or drop out of high school, and given adolescent decisions, the parent decides whether to house and...

The recent withdrawal of Cox-2 Inhibitors has generated debate on the role of information in drug diffusion: can the market learn the efficacy of new drugs, or does it depend solely on manufacturer advertising and FDA updates? In this study, we use a novel data set to study the diffusion of...

Trust is vital for market development, but how can trust be enhanced in a marketplace? A common view is that more trusting may help to build trust, especially in less developed economies. In this paper, we argue that more trusting may lead to less trust. We set up a rational expectation model in...

A central prediction of information economics is that market forces can lead businesses to voluntarily provide information about the quality of their products, yet little voluntary disclosure is observed in the field. In this paper, we demonstrate that the inconsistency between theory and...

Are workers in modern economies working "too hard"--would they be better off if an equilibrium with fewer work hours were achieved? We examine changes in life satisfaction of Japanese and Koreans over a period when hours of work were cut exogenously because employers suddenly faced an overtime...

We examine the role of repetition in government regulation. Using Florida restaurant inspection data from 2003 to 2010, we find that inspectors new to the inspected restaurant report 12.7-17.5% more violations than the second visit of a repeat inspector. This effect is even more pronounced if...

How would people spend time if confronted by permanent declines in market work? We identify preferences off exogenous cuts in legislated standard hours that raised employers' overtime costs in Japan around 1990 and Korea in the early 2000s. We estimate the probability that an individual was...

In this article, we show that a small innovation in inspection technology can make substantial differences in inspection outcomes. For restaurant hygiene inspections, the state of Florida has introduced a handheld electronic device, the portable digital assistant (PDA), which reminds inspectors...

Social commentators have pointed to problems of women workers who face time stress' an absence of sufficient time to accomplish all their tasks. An economic theory views time stress as reflecting how tightly the time constraint binds households. Time stress will be more prevalent in households...