I analyze a model of directed search in which a consumer inspects a finite number of products sharing attributes with each others. The consumer discovers her valuation for the attributes of the inspected products and adapts her search strategy based on what she has learned. The consumer...

This paper examines the impact of Generative AI (GAI) on communication through the lens of salience and signalling models. It explores how GAI affects both senders' ability to create salient messages and receivers' costs of absorbing them. The analysis reveals that while GAI can increase...

This paper studies the long-term consequences of communism on present-day freedom of expression values in two settings - East Germany and the states linked to the sphere of influence of the former USSR. Exploiting the natural experiment of German separation and later reunification, we show that...

Independent and high-quality evaluations of government policies are an important input for designing evidence-based policy. Lack of incentives and institutions to write such evaluations, on the other hand, carry the risk of turning the system into a costly beauty contest. We study one of the...

We consider a dynamic model in which a principal decides what information to release about a product of unknown quality (e.g., a vaccine) to incentivize agents to experiment with the product. Assuming that the agents are long-lived and forward-looking, their incentive to wait and see other...

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...

In a labor market model with cheap talk, employers can send messages about their willingness to pay for higher-ability workers, which job-seekers can use to direct their search and tailor their wage bid. Introducing such messages leads—under certain conditions—to an informative separating...

We examine the evolution of spatial house price dispersion during Germany’s recent housing boom. Using a dataset of sales listings, we find that house price dispersion has significantly increased, which is driven entirely by rising price variation across postal codes. We show that both price...