This paper overviews the economics of scientific grants, focusing on the interplay between the inherent uncertainty in research, researchers' incentives, and grant design. Grants differ from traditional market systems and other science and innovation policy tools, such as prizes and patents. We...

Online ratings play an important role in many markets. However, how fast they can reveal seller types remains unclear. To study this question, we propose a new model in which a buyer learns about the seller’s type from previous ratings and her own experience and rates the seller if she learns...

We investigate how heterogeneous social preferences affect the communication of painful information in social relationships. We characterize the existence conditions for a pooling equilibrium in which individuals conceal painful information because revealing the latter would signal that they are...

We study the effects of information on attitudes towards inheritance taxation using survey experiments fielded in Germany. We show that information about tax allowances increases demand for higher taxes and shifts public opinion from favoring abolition to supporting the tax. Effects are...

Consumers make mistakes when facing complex purchasing decision problems but if at least some consumers choose only among offers that are easy to compare with others then firms will adopt common ways to present their offers and thus make choice easier (Gaudeul and Sugden, 2011). We design an...

We report the results of an original experiment that was designed to test the strength and robustness of the attraction effect. Rather than the usual simple tests for this effect, we consider a conceptually simple consumer purchasing task where alternatives are however difficult to evaluate. For...

In this paper we provide choice-process experimental evidence that the attraction effect is a short-term phenomenon, that disappears when individuals are given time and incentives to revise their choices. The attraction (or decoy) effect is the most prominent example of context effects, and it...

We report the results of an original experiment designed to test the strength and robustness of the attraction effect. We consider a conceptually simple consumer purchasing task where alternatives are however difficult to evaluate. For the attraction effect to be observed, the consumer must go...

Firms can exploit consumers' mistakes when facing complex purchasing decision problems but Gaudeul and Sugden (2012) argue that if at least some consumers disregard offers that are difficult to compare with others then firms will be forced into adopting common ways to present their offers and...

Consumers make mistakes when facing complex purchasing decision problems but if at least some consumers disregard any offers that is difficult to compare with others then firms will adopt common ways to present their offers and thus make choice easier. We design an original experiment to...