Libertarian paternalism, as advanced by Cass Sunstein, is seriously flawed, but not primarily for the reasons that most commentators suggest. Libertarian paternalism and its attendant regulatory implications are too libertarian, not too paternalistic, and as a result are in considerable tension...

This article develops a Bayesian persuasion model examining a manager's incentives to gather information when the manager can disseminate this information selectively to interested parties (“users”) and when the objectives of the manager and the users are not perfectly aligned. The model...

In the modern regulatory state, there is a serious tension between two indispensable ideas. The first is that it is important to measure, both in advance and on a continuing basis, the effects of regulation on social welfare, usually through cost-benefit analysis. The second idea, attributable...

Should there be a right not to be manipulated? What kind of right? On Kantian grounds, manipulation, lies, and paternalistic coercion are moral wrongs, and for similar reasons; they deprive people of agency, insult their dignity, and fail to respect personal autonomy. On welfarist grounds,...

Some of our judgments are unstable, in the sense that they are an artifact of, or endogenous to, what else we see. This is true of sensory perception: Whether an object counts as blue or purple depends on what other objects surround it. It is also true for ethical judgments: Whether conduct...

This paper examines the three major explanations for the disparity between WTP and WTA observed in contingent value surveys and laboratory experiments: a belief that the results must be biased in some fashion, Hanemann's (1991) substitutes hypothesis, and the loss aversion model proposed by...

Bayesian consumers infer that hidden add-on prices (e.g. the cost of ink for a printer) are likely to be high prices. If consumers are Bayesian, firms will not shroud information in equilibrium. However, shrouding may occur in an economy with some myopic (or unaware) consumers. Such shrouding...

Sender conveys scarce information to a number of receivers to maximize the sum of receiver payoffs. Each receiver’s payoff depends on the state of the world and an action she takes. The optimal action is state contingent. Under mild regularity conditions, we show that the payoff of each...

We define a generalized state-space model with interactive unawareness and probabilistic beliefs. Such models are desirable for many potential applications of asymmetric unawareness. We develop Bayesian games with unawareness, define equilibrium, and prove existence. We show how equilibria are...