We model the reporting of sexual misconduct. Individuals under-report misconduct due to strategic uncertainty over whether others will report and corroborate a pattern of behavior. Under-reporting occurs if and only if misconduct is widespread. Making sanctions more responsive to reports,...

Why do individuals interpret the same information differently? We propose that individuals follow Bayes' Rule when forming posteriors with one exception: when assessing the credibility of experts, they "double-dip" the data and use already-updated beliefs instead of their priors. Our proposed...

Why does misinformation persist, and how does it distort the long-run beliefs and actions of rational agents? We study a model where receivers see an infinite stream of messages from a sender of unknown type who observes private signals about an unknown state of the world. We characterize the...

VIX futures prices rose slowly in late February and early March 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Futures price premiums, defined as futures prices minus real-time statistical forecasts of future VIX values, turned sharply negative and remained negative until mid-April. Trading strategies...

This paper addresses the role of non-binding goals to attenuate time inconsistency. Present-biased agents have linear reference-dependent preferences and endogenously set a goal that is the reference point. They face an infinite horizon, optimal stopping problem in continuous time, where there...

This paper develops a theoretical model of consumer demand for an energy conservation program that involves non-binding, self-set goals. We present evidence from a Northern Illinois goal-setting program, aimed at reducing residential electricity consumption, that is difficult to reconcile with...

This paper offers an information-based model of social interaction, and analyzes optimal investment and pricing of services that facilitate interaction in a duopoly. Agents have uncertainty over their preferences but are aware that they are correlated with others’, so there exists an incentive...

This paper studies the role of goal bracketing to attenuate time inconsistency. When setting non-binding goals for a multi-stage project, an agent must also decide how and when to evaluate himself against such goals. In particular, he can bracket broadly by setting an aggregate goal for the...