Mass layoffs give rise to groups of unemployed workers who possess similar characteristics and, therefore, may learn from one another's experience searching for a new job. Two factors lead them to exert too little effort in equilibrium. The first is an information externality: searchers fail to...

This article presents a selective review of economic research on attentional choice, taking an observation of Block & Marschak (1960) as its starting point. Because standard choice data conflate utilities and perception, they point out that it is inadequate for research in which attention is...

What discount rate should be applied to social investments? It is standard to use the market interest rate, thereby respecting private preferences. We show that application of this "revealed preference" criterion rests on faith, not on logic. It is justified only if preferences over all choices,...

Economic theorists have given little attention to health-related externalities, such as those involved in the spread of AIDS. One reason for this is the critical role played by psychological factors, such as fear of testing, in the continued spread of the disease. We develop a model of AIDS...

How worker productivity evolves with tenure and experience is central to economics, shaping, for example, life-cycle earnings and the losses from involuntary job separation. Yet, worker-level productivity is hard to identify from observational data. This paper introduces direct measurement of...

"That mistakes are made is clear. What is meant by that is not. Measuring whatever might be meant and scientifically studying it is therefore even more challenging. These lectures introduce an interdisciplinary science of mistakes to cut the Gordian knot. The key building blocks are model...

What do machines learn, and why? To answer these questions we import models of human cognition into machine learning. We propose two ways of modeling machine learners based on this join: feasibility-based and cost-based machine learning. We evaluate and estimate our models using a deep learning...

The central question we address in this paper is: what can an analyst infer from choice data about what a decision maker has learned? The key constraint we impose, which is shared across models of Bayesian learning, is that any learning must be rationalizable. To implement this constraint, we...

Despite its centrality in monetary policy, communication is not a focus in social security reform. We investigate the potential for active communication to dissipate apparently widespread public confusion about the future of social security. We implement a simple information treatment in which...