Designing Interrogations 7 January 2024 Alessandro Ispano and Péter VidaWe provide a model of interrogations with two-sided asymmetric information. The suspect knows his status as guilty or innocent and the likely strength of the law enforcer’s evidence, which is informative about the suspect’s status and may also disprove lies. We compare prosecution errors in the equilibrium of the one-shot interrogation and in the optimal mechanism under full commitment.
Voluntary Disclosure in Asymmetric Contests 7 January 2024 Christian Ewerhart and Julia LareidaThis paper studies the incentives for interim voluntary disclosure of verifiable information in probabilistic all-pay contests with two-sided incomplete information. Private information may concern marginal cost, valuations, and ability. Our main result says that, if the contest is uniformly asymmetric, then full revelation is the unique perfect Bayesian equilibrium outcome.
Strategic Foundations of Efficient Rational Expectations 12 December 2023 Paulo Barelli, Srihari Govindan, and Robert WilsonWe study an economy with traders whose payoffs are quasilinear and whose private signals are informative about an unobserved state parameter. The limit economy has infinitely many traders partitioned into a finite set of symmetry classes called types. Market mechanisms in a class that includes auctions yield the same outcome as the Walrasian rational expectations equilibrium if and only if the efficient allocation has a monotonicity property. Examples illustrate cases where they differ. Monotonicity restricts the heterogeneity among traders’ types.
Measuring Diffusion over a Large Network 12 December 2023 Xiaoqi He and Kyungchul SongThis paper introduces a measure of the diffusion of binary outcomes over a large, sparse network, when the diffusion is observed in two time periods. The measure captures the aggregated spillover effect of the state-switches in the initial period on their neighbors’ outcomes in the second period. This paper introduces a causal network that captures the causal connections among the cross-sectional units over the two periods. It shows that when the researcher’s observed network contains the causal network as a subgraph, the measure of diffusion is identified as a simple, spatio-temporal dependence measure of observed outcomes.
Migration and the Value of Social Networks 6 December 2023 Joshua E. Blumenstock, Guanghua Chi, and Xu TanHow do social networks influence the decision to migrate? Prior work suggests two distinct mechanisms that have historically been difficult to differentiate: as a conduit of information, and as a source of social and economic support. We disentangle these mechanisms using a massive ‘digital trace’ dataset that allows us to observe the migration decisions made by millions of individuals over several years, as well as the complete social network of each person in the months before and after migration.
Credit Allocation and Macroeconomic Fluctuations 26 November 2023 Karsten Müller and Emil VernerWe study the relationship between credit expansions, macroeconomic fluctuations, and financial crises using a novel database on the sectoral distribution of private credit for 117 countries since 1940. We document that, during credit booms, credit flows disproportionately to the non-tradable sector. Credit expansions to the non-tradable sector, in turn, systematically predict subsequent growth slowdowns and financial crises. In contrast, credit expansions to the tradable sector are associated with sustained output and productivity growth without a higher risk of a financial crisis.
A Model of Online Misinformation 20 November 2023 Daron Acemoglu, Asuman Ozdaglar, and James SideriusWe present a model of online content sharing where agents sequentially observe an article and decide whether to share it with others. This content may or may not contain misinformation. Each agent starts with an ideological bias and gains utility from positive social media interactions but does not want to be called out for propagating misinformation. We characterize the (Bayesian-Nash) equilibria of this social media game and establish that it exhibits strategic complementarities.
Decomposing Duration Dependence in a Stopping Time Model 20 November 2023 Fernando Alvarez, Katarina Borovickova, and Robert ShimerWe develop an economic model of transitions in and out of employment. Heterogeneous workers switch employment status when the net benefit from working, a Brownian motion with drift, hits optimally-chosen barriers. This implies that the duration of jobless spells for each worker has an inverse Gaussian distribution.
