This paper explores whether Big Data, taking the form of extensive high dimensional records, can reduce the cost of adverse selection by private service providers in government-run capitation schemes, such as Medicare Advantage. We argue that using data to improve the ex ante precision of...

People's value for their own time is a key input in evaluating public policies: evaluations should account for time taken away from work or leisure as a result of policy. Using rich choice data collected from farming households in western Kenya, we show that households exhibit non-transitive...

Cartels participating in procurement auctions frequently use bid rotation or prioritize incumbents to allocate contracts. However, establishing a link between observed allocation patterns and firm conduct has been difficult: there are cost-based competitive explanations for such patterns. We...

We evaluate secure survey methods designed for the ongoing monitoring of harassment in organizations. We use the resulting data to answer policy relevant questions about the nature of harassment: How prevalent is it? What share of managers is responsible for the misbehavior? How isolated are its...

In the context of collecting property taxes from 13432 households in a district of Lima (Peru), we investigate whether prioritized enforcement can improve the effective use of limited enforcement capacity. We randomly assign households to two treatment arms: one replicating the city's usual...

We propose an equilibrium theory of data-driven antitrust oversight in which regulators launch investigations on the basis of suspicious bidding patterns and cartels can adapt to the statistical screens used by regulators. We emphasize the use of asymptotically safe tests, i.e. tests that are...

Clinical trials following the "gold standard" of random assignment frequently use independent lotteries to allocate patients to treatment and control arms. However, independent assignment can generate treatment and control arms that are unbalanced (i.e. treatment and control populations with...

This paper describes a number of strategies that experimenters may use to improve the external validity of their own findings, and of their research field as a whole. The paper emphasizes a dynamic view of research processes, in which learning about treatment and treatment adoption does not...

We document a novel bidding pattern observed in procurement auctions from Japan: winning bids tend to be isolated. There is a missing mass of close losing bids. This pattern is suspicious in the following sense: it is inconsistent with competitive behavior under arbitrary information structures....

We study the impact of secure survey designs ensuring plausible deniability on information transmission in organizations. We are interested in settings in which fear of retaliation makes potential informants reluctant to reveal the truth. Theory predicts that: (i) popular randomized-response...