We develop a model in which an overconfident agent learns about groups in society from observations of his and others' successes. In our model, both the agent's information and his beliefs are multi-dimensional, allowing us to study interactions between different views. Overall, society always...

We explore theoretically and experimentally whether information design can be used by trustees as a signaling device to boost trusting acts in once-off interactions. In our main setting, a trustee partially or fully decides a binary payoff allocation and designs an information structure, then a...

Overconfident behavior, the excessive willingness to bet on one’s performance, may be driven by optimistic beliefs and/or ambiguity attitudes. Separating these factors is key for understanding and correcting overconfident behavior, as they may call for different corrective actions. We present...

We examine whether the desire for more information is people's dominant motive for reading economic and political news. Drawing on representative samples of the U.S. population with more than 15,000 respondents in total, we measure and experimentally vary people's beliefs about the...

In environments with expected utility, it has long been established that speculative trade cannot occur (Milgrom and Stokey), and that the value of public information is negative in economies with risk-sharing and no aggregate uncertainty (Hirshleifer, Schlee). We show that these results are...

Uncertain information is frequently confirmed or retracted after people have initially heard it. A large existing literature has studied how people change their beliefs in response to new information, however, how people react to information about previous information is still unclear. We...