We study markets for sensitive personal information. An agent wants to communicate with another party but any revealed information can be intercepted and sold to a third party whose reaction harms the agent. The market for information induces an adverse sorting effect, allocating the information...

We study markets for sensitive personal information. An agent wants to communicate with another party but any revealed information can be intercepted and sold to a third party whose reaction harms the agent. The market for information induces an adverse sorting effect, allocating the information...

There is a burgeoning literature highlighting asymmetric information among household members. However, little is known about the source of the asymmetry and its effect on efficiency. Using a unique survey of Ghanaian households, we examine the accuracy of spousal cross-reports and the effect of...

Primary care physicians have two roles: the healer and the gatekeeper. We show that, due to information asymmetries, they cannot be expected to fulfill the latter role. Better gatekeepers will be poorer healers; hence all patients, both truly sick and shirkers, will strictly prefer physicians...

Moderne Marktordnungen schützen den Verbraucher vor Schäden und sichern den Leistungswettbewerb und die Funktionsfähigkeit von Märkten. Wettbewerbsorientierte Verbraucherpolitik und verbraucherorientierte Wettbewerbspolitik ergänzen sich dabei. Die Verhaltensökonomik zeigt allerdings, dass...

The article shows that heterogeneous incomplete private information can explain the limited existence of guaranteed renewable health insurance (GR) contracts in an otherwise frictionless markets. We derive a unique equilibrium that can be of the form that either only a portion of the population...

Some insurance markets are characterized by “advantageous selection,” that is, ex-post risk and coverage are negatively correlated. We show that expectation-based loss aversion as in K'oszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007) provides a natural explanation for this phenomenon when agents face modest...

In an overlapping generations maximization framework with consumers, whose information on uncertain future income realizations is front-loaded, a closed form aggregate consumption function with CRRA preferences is derived. To have a closed form solution we assume that consumers solve their...