This paper argues that, to be forward-looking in a logically consistent sense, a decision maker must take account of his overall well-being, not just his instantaneous utility, in all future periods. However, such a decision-maker is necessarily time inconsistent. The paper explores the...

Prominent research argues that consumers often use personal budgets to manage self-control problems. This paper analyzes the link between budgeting and self-control problems in consumption-saving decisions. It shows that the use of good-specific budgets depends on the combination of a demand for...

The problem of optimally designing information for multiple agents who interact in a game can be formulated as a linear program. We explore its dual representation and show that it provides a novel perspective and new economic insights into the information-design problem. Through the lens of the...

Social media have become an increasingly important source of information about political, social and economic issues. While beneficial on many levels, the decentralized nature of these media may expose societies to novel risks of manipulation by third parties. To evaluate these risks, we study a...

How do future well-being and preferences affect the current well-being and preferences of forward-looking agents? Our theory explores this question, producing a new class of tractable models which capture and explain phenomena such as present bias, consumption interdependence, sign effects in...

Many online platforms intermediate trade between sellers and buyers relying on individual data records of their personal characteristics. Is one buyer's record more valuable than another? How much is each worth and why? After formulating this intermediation as an information-design problem, we...

We study learning via shared news. Each period agents receive the same quantity and quality of first-hand information and can share it with friends. Some friends (possibly few) share selectively, generating heterogeneous news diets across agents akin to echo chambers. Agents are aware of...