When a decision-maker's attention is limited, her decisions depend on what she focuses on. This gives interested parties an incentive to manipulate not only the substance of communication but also the decision-maker's attention allocation. This paper models such attention manipulation. In its...

Since 2007, all insurance intermediaries face negligence liability that is supposed to reallocate risks and set economic incentives. Nonetheless, further measures are taken to improve consumer protection. So, the question arises does the liability rule influence the agents behavior, or not, and...

The paper provides a methodology which is suitable for the analysis of the social cost of disease and the benefits and cost of health intervention by integrating public health analysis and economics. The approach developed in the paper is applied to food-borne diarrhea in Rwanda. The results...

Two laboratory studies investigated the effect of price transparency on consumers' decision-making in the residential electricity market. The first tested whether consumers have difficulties when confronted with unit prices expressed as discounts from standard rates, which vary between...

Dodd-Frank, the US financial reform law passed in response to the 2008 financial crisis, established the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), a new federal regulator with the sole responsibility of protecting consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices. This decision marked...

Whether consumers are aware of potentially adverse product effects is key to private and social incentives to disclose information about undesirable product characteristics. In a monopoly model with a mix of aware and unaware consumers, a larger share of unaware consumers makes information...

The paper reports the results of an experiment where asymmetric sellers of a product can obfuscate the market. We show that policy measures may have unintended effects of increasing obfuscation incentives. We find that policies that limit the effectiveness of obfuscation and policies that...