Are location-specific factors--such as the education and attitude of the local workforce, supplier networks, institutional infrastructure, and local "culture"--important for understanding persistent heterogeneities among firms? We address this question in the context of the automobile industry....

Can heuristic information processing affect important product markets? Analyzing over 22 million wholesale used-car transactions, we find evidence of left-digit bias in the processing of odometer values, whereby individuals focus on the number's leftmost digits. The bias leads to discontinuous...

This paper develops an approach for estimating people's perceived and actual self-control problems in the field, and for investigating whether offers of commitment contracts are well-targeted tools for addressing self-control problems. In an experiment on gym attendance (N=1,248), we estimate a...

Financial incentives have been shown to have strong positive short-run effects for problematic health behaviors, but the effects often disappear once incentive programs end. This paper analyzes the results of a large-scale workplace field experiment to examine whether self-funded commitment...

Are location-specific factors--such as the education and attitude of the local workforce, supplier networks, institutional infrastructure, and local "culture"--important for understanding persistent heterogeneities among firms? We address this question in the context of the automobile industry....

Can heuristic information processing affect important product markets? We explore whether the tendency to focus on the left-most digit of a number affects how used car buyers incorporate odometer values in their purchase decisions. Analyzing over 22 million wholesale used-car transactions, we...

We analyze discrimination in a new type of credit market known as peer-to-peer lending. Specifically, we examine how lenders in this online market respond to signals of characteristics such as race, age, and gender that are conveyed via pictures and text. We find evidence of significant racial...

With increasing interest from commercial players in developing insurance markets to meet the needs of low-income people, efforts to find sustainable products have expanded rapidly yet remain elusive. This is particularly true in the domain of health insurance, where the general challenges of...

Insurance choices are often hard to rationalize by standard theory and frequently appear sub-optimal. A key reason may be that people are unable to map the cost-sharing features of plans to their distribution of financial consequences. We develop and experimentally test a decision aid that...