-
作者：Moshary, Sarah
作者单位：University of Chicago
摘要：In 2010, the US Supreme Court loosened contribution limits to Political Action Committees (PACs), sparking fears that big donors could exert outsize influence on elections by funding PAC advertising. However, PACs are potentially handicapped when buying advertising time; data from 2012 reveal that PACs pay 32% above regulated campaign rates. I estimate a model of demand for advertising by PACs, exploiting the misalignment of state and media market borders to address price endogeneity. I find t...
-
作者：Tan, Xu; Wen, Quan
作者单位：University of Washington; University of Washington Seattle
摘要：A social planner selects heterogeneously biased experts to (either sequentially or simultaneously) acquire costly signals, and then agents vote between two alternatives. To maximize social welfare, the social planner adopts an alternating mechanism-choosing extremely biased experts whose preferences oppose the pivotal voter's current preference-in the optimal sequential mechanism, whereas she chooses mildly biased experts in the optimal simultaneous mechanism. Despite the flexibility of a sequ...
-
作者：Li, Lingfang (Ivy); Tadelis, Steven; Zhou, Xiaolan
作者单位：Fudan University; Fudan University; University of California System; University of California Berkeley; National Bureau of Economic Research; Center for Economic & Policy Research (CEPR); Leibniz Association; Ifo Institut; East China Normal University
摘要：Seller reputation, generated by buyer feedback, is critical to fostering trust in online marketplaces. Marketplaces or sellers may choose to compensate buyers for providing feedback. Signaling theory predicts that only sellers of high-quality products will reward buyers for truthful feedback, especially when a product lacks any feedback and when the seller is not established. We confirm these hypotheses using Taobao's reward-for-feedback mechanism. High-quality products, especially without est...
-
作者：Kireyev, Pavel
作者单位：INSEAD Business School
摘要：I develop an empirical model of idea generation contests with heterogeneous participants and endogenous entry, fit the model to data from a platform used by major advertisers, and simulate counterfactual contest designs. The empirical model resolves ambiguous predictions yielded by contest theory about the effects of different prize structures on contest outcomes. Simulations reveal the impact of strategies that hold fixed total award and balance competition by handicapping advantaged particip...
-
作者：Johnen, Johannes
作者单位：Universite Catholique Louvain
摘要：In many deceptive markets, firms design contracts to exploit mistakes of naive consumers. These contracts also attract less-profitable sophisticated consumers. I study such markets when firms compete repeatedly. By observing their customers' usage patterns, firms acquire private information about their level of naivete. First, I find that private information on naivete mitigates competition and is of great value even with homogeneous products. Second, competition between initially symmetricall...
