Many everyday activities are habitual. Among the most common human activities is communication. If people primarily communicate in a common-interests environment, they may form habits of truth-telling and believing messages. If they primarily communicate in a conflicting-interests environment,...

Does attention have a causal impact on risky decisions? We address this question in a preregistered experiment in which participants accept or reject a series of mixed gambles while exogenously varying how information can be sampled. Specifically, in each trial participants observe the outcomes...

In economic environments, decision-makers may strategically delay irreversible investments to learn from the actions of others creating socially suboptimal outcomes. We investigate if and how communication mitigates the strategic delay in investment timings. Players choose when to invest in a...

This paper assesses the impact of a mental health literacy intervention on the demand for mental health support among university students. We run a field experiment with 2,978 university students from one of the largest Dutch universities. The literacy intervention provides information on the...

We study the impact of bots on social learning in a social network setting. Regular agents receive independent noisy signals about the true value of a variable and then communicate in a network. They na¨?vely update beliefs by repeatedly taking weighted averages of neighbors' opinions. Bots are...

We propose a tractable method for estimation of a simultaneous search model for differentiated products that allows for observed and unobserved heterogeneity in both preferences and search costs. We show that for type I extreme value distributed search costs, expressions for search and purchase...

In economic environments, decision-makers can strategically delay irreversible investments to learn from the actions of others. This creates free-riding incentives and can lead to socially suboptimal outcomes. We experimentally examine if and how communication mitigates this free-riding problem...

Governments, central banks, and private organizations frequently face the challenge of convincing their audience to take a specific action. One key choice is whether to send a public message that can coordinate the audience's actions or to rely instead on private messages that may differ across...

Sustainability ratings help consumers understand the environmental impact of their purchases. Such ratings have increased the consumers' sustainable choices in the electrodomestics and housing markets. In the particular case of energy labels, sustainable products are also associated with private...