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...

Casting mechanism design with evidence in the framework of Myerson (1982) implies that his generalized revelation principle directly applies, and we thus obtain standard notions of incentive compatible direct mechanisms. Their specific nature depends, however, on whether the presentation of...