Informational interventions have been shown to significantly change behavior across a variety of settings. Is that because they lead subjects to merely update beliefs in the right direction? Or, alternatively, is it to a large extent because they increase the salience of the decision they...

The ability to uncover preferences from choices is fundamental for both positive economics and welfare analysis. Overwhelming evidence shows that choice is stochastic, which has given rise to random utility models as the dominant paradigm in applied microeconomics. However, as is well known, it...

With infinite horizon, optimal rules for sequential search from a known distribution feature a constant reservation value that is independent of whether recall of past options is possible. We extend this result to the the case when there are multiple distributions to choose from: it is optimal...

Modern communication technologies enable efficient exchange of information, but often sacrifice direct human interaction inherent in more traditional forms of communication. This raises the question of whether the lack of personal interaction induces individuals to exploit informational...

Sellers often have the power to censor the reviews of their products. We explore the effect of these censorship policies in markets where some consumers are unaware of possible censorship. We find that if the share of such "naive" consumers is not too large, then rational consumers treat any bad...

We experimentally study settings where an individual may have an incentive to adopt negative beliefs about another's intentions in order to justify egoistic behavior. Our first study uses a game in which a player can take money from an opponent in order to prevent the opponent from subsequently...

The ability to uncover preferences from choices is fundamental for both positive economics and welfare analysis. Overwhelming evidence shows that choice is stochastic, which has given rise to random utility models as the dominant paradigm in applied microeconomics. However, as is well known, it...

The aim of this paper is to study asset reallocation in financial markets subject to search, bargaining, and information frictions, and to analyze the impact of monetary policy on equilibrium outcomes. The main results show that private information regarding the quality of an asset impairs its...

In response to the financial crisis of 2007/08, all major central banks decreased interest rates to historically low levels and created large excess reserves. Central bankers and academics currently discuss how to implement monetary policy, going forward. We find that paying interest on reserves...

This paper studies the effect of disclosing conflicts of interests on strategic communication when the sender has lying costs. I present a simple economic mechanism under which such disclosure often leads to more informative, but at the same time also to more biased messages. This benefits...