This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness....

This paper examines the potential reinforcement of motivated beliefs when individuals with identical biases communicate. We propose a controlled online experiment that allows to manipulate belief biases and the communication environment. We find that communication, even among like-minded...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower competent politicians. In our model, candidates are privately informed about their abilities and are driven by office rents as well as...

In the last decade, social media and the Internet have amplified the possibility to spread false information, a.k.a. fake news, which has become a serious threat to the credibility of politicians, organizations, and other decision makers. This paper proposes a framework for investigating the...

In the last two decades, the widespread use of web-based social networks has led to a higher visibility of workers to the labor market. We theoretically and experimentally analyze the consequences of such increased labor market transparency for the efficiency of job assignments, the wages of...

This paper provides a comprehensive analysis regarding strategic interaction under expectation-based loss-aversion. First, we develop a coherent framework for the analysis by extending the equilibrium concepts of Koszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007) to strategic interaction and demonstrate how to...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower well-suited politicians. In our model, candidates are heterogeneous in two unobservable quality aspects: ability and public-spiritedness....

This dissertation tackles three questions theoretically and empirically. The first chapter studies how non-binding default options influence the behavior of consumers. We argue that default options arise in an inherently strategic setting between a default setter and decision makers. Building...

This paper studies the effects of power-concentrating institutions on the quality of political selection, i.e., the voters' capacity to identify and empower competent politicians. In our model, candidates are privately informed about their abilities and are driven by office rents as well as...

This paper studies the intermediation of auto loans through auto dealers using new and comprehensive data. Lenders give auto dealers discretion to price loans. The first part of our project leverages details of the contracts between lenders and dealers to demonstrate that many consumers are...