The paper addresses the issue of “fake news” through a well-known and widely studied experiment that illustrates possible uses of economics and game theory for understanding the phenomenon. Public news is viewed as an aggregation of decentralized pieces of valuable information about complex...

This paper studies the consumption decisions of agents who face costs of acquiring, absorbing and processing information. These consumers rationally choose to only sporadically update their information and re-compute their optimal consumption plans. In between updating dates, they remain...

In this paper we show that subtle forms of deceit undermine the effectiveness of incentives. We design an experiment in which the principal has an interest in underreporting the true performance difference between the agents in a dynamic tournament. According to the standard approach, rational...

This paper investigates how households form their perceptions of consumer price inflation. Using data from the harmonized EU consumer survey, we find that inflation perceptions are inefficient and highly heterogeneous, yet contemporaneously related to the actual rate of inflation. Consequently,...

We suggest a test for discovering whether a potential expert is informed of the distribution of a stochastic process. In a non-Bayesian non-parametric setting, the expert is asked to make a prediction which is tested against a single realization of the stochastic process. It is shown that by...

The imperfect appropriability of revenues from innovation affects the incentives of firms to invest, and to disclose information about their innovative productivity. It creates a free-rider effect in the competition for the innovation that countervails the familiar business-stealing effect....

As evidence is accumulating that subjective expectations influence behavior and that these expectations are sometimes biased, it becomes policy-relevant to know how to influence individuals' expectations. Information in the media is likely to affect how people picture the future. This paper...

We use a limited information environment to mimic the state of confusion in an experimental, repeated public goods game. The results show that reinforcement learning leads to dynamics similar to those observed in standard public goods games. However, closer inspection shows that individual decay...

Experimental studies of search behavior suggest that individuals stop searching earlier than predicted by the optimal, risk-neutral stopping rule. Such behavior could be generated by two different classes of decision rules: rules that are optimal conditional on utility functions departing from...