A large body of research has explored the importance of auction design and information structure for auction outcomes. Much less work has considered the importance of the auction process. For example, in many auctions, auctioneers are present and can impact the process of the auction by varying...

We investigate whether the first digit of an odometer reading is more salient to consumers than subsequent digits. We find that retail transaction prices and volumes of used vehicles drop discontinuously at 10,000-mile odometer thresholds, echoing effects found in the wholesale market by...

Can heuristic information processing affect important product markets? We explore whether the tendency to focus on the left-most digit of a number affects how used car buyers incorporate odometer values in their purchase decisions. Analyzing over 22 million wholesale used-car transactions, we...

Religious worship is integral to the lives of millions of Americans. In this paper, I provide a descriptive analysis of religious worship attendance using geodata from smartphones for over 2 million Americans in 2019. I establish several key findings. First, 73% of people step into a religious...

Insurance affects the variability of consumption over time, which is not captured in standard expected utility of wealth models. We develop a consumption-utility model that shows how liquidity constraints and borrowing costs impact the value of insurance. Liquidity constraints generate high...

Financial incentives have been shown to have strong positive short-run effects for problematic health behaviors, but the effects often disappear once incentive programs end. This paper analyzes the results of a large-scale workplace field experiment to examine whether self-funded commitment...

Are location-specific factors--such as the education and attitude of the local workforce, supplier networks, institutional infrastructure, and local "culture"--important for understanding persistent heterogeneities among firms? We address this question in the context of the automobile industry....

Can measured risk attitudes and associated structural models predict insurance demand? In an experiment (n = 1,730), we elicit measures of utility curvature, probability weighting, loss aversion, and preference for certainty and use them to parameterize seventeen common structural models (e.g.,...

Recent large-scale randomized experiments find that helping people form implementation intentions by asking when and where they plan to act increases one-time actions, such as vaccinations, preventative screenings and voting. We investigate the effect of a simple scalable planning intervention...

Recent studies have found that many people select into health plans with higher coverage (e.g., lower deductibles) even when those plans are financially dominated by other options. We explore whether having dominated options is common by analyzing data on plan designs from the Kaiser Family...