We compare Transparency and Privacy in credit markets. A long-lived borrower, who has a risky investment opportunity, seeks loans from a sequence of short-lived lenders. Under Transparency, all the information about the past investment outcomes is shared among the future lenders, which helps the...

This paper studies optimal contest design for competitive experimentation. The principal seeks contributions from multiple agents whose experimentation efforts are unobservable. To induce effort, the contest must provide agents with an information rent that increases in the duration of the...

This paper studies a two-stage R&D race, in which, at the outset, firms are uncertain regarding the viability of the project. Learning through experimentation introduces a bilateral (dynamic) feedback mechanism. For relatively low-value products, the equilibrium cutoff belief coincides with the...

We review the emerging literature on information acquisition in field settings. We first document an increase in studies on information acquisition and review relevant studies in different subfields of economics, including macroeconomics, political economy, labor economics, health economics, and...

We review methodological questions relevant for the design of information provision experiments. We first provide a literature review of major areas in which information provision experiments are applied. We then outline key measurement challenges and design recommendations that may be of help...

We design an experiment to study the implications of information networks for the incentive to acquire costly information, market liquidity, investors' earnings and asset price characteristics in a financial market. Social communication crowds out information production as a result of agent's...

Despite a vast theoretical literature that builds on costly information acquisition, there is no direct evidence on the importance of information costs in investors’ private information choices. Using a large sample of Chinese mutual fund managers’ visits to firm headquarters and exploiting...

We use an experiment to test whether consumers optimally acquire information on energy costs in appliance markets where, like many contexts, consumers are poorly informed and make mistakes despite freely available information. To test for optimal information acquisition we compare the average...

We conduct an experiment with a representative sample from the US to study households' demand for macroeconomic information. Respondents who learn of a higher personal exposure to unemployment risk during recessions increase their demand for an expert forecast about the likelihood of a...