Rational individuals who obtain a premium by passing an imprecise test change their choice of costly competence when the pass threshold varies. At given premium that reaction prevents variation of the failure rate completely if the marginal cost of competence is constant, only partially if it is...

Most news stories contain both granular quantitative information and coarse categorizations. For instance, company earnings are reported as a dollar figure alongside categorizations, such as whether earnings beat or missed market expectations. We formalize and study the hypothesis that when a...

Online ratings emerge from a multi-stage process that can systematically distort their informational content. We develop a unified framework decomposing the rating process into distinct components: experienced quality (driven by intrinsic quality, seller effort, and price), expectations formed...

Using internet search data, we examine how geographic proximity shapes individual investors' information acquisition behavior. Focusing on the Chinese stock market, we document a pronounced local bias in information demand: individual investors search more intensively for stocks of firms...