We examine whether the desire for more information is people's dominant motive for reading economic and political news. Drawing on representative samples of the U.S. population with more than 15,000 respondents in total, we measure and experimentally vary people's beliefs about the...

Announcing a large fiscal stimulus may signal the government’s pessimism about the severity of a recession to the private sector, impairing the stabilizing effects of the policy. Using a theoretical model, we show that these signaling effects occur when the stimulus exceeds expectations and...

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

In this paper, we employ a registry of legal insider trading for Dutch listed firms to investigate the information content of trades by corporate insiders. Using a standard event-study methodology, we examine short-term stock price behavior around trades. We find that purchases are followed by...

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...

We develop a theoretical analysis of two widely used regulations of genetic tests, disclosure duty and consent law, and we run several experiments in order to shed light on both the take-up rate of genetic testing and on the comparison of policyholders' welfare under the two regulations....

Credence goods markets are characterized by pronounced informational asymmetries between consumers and expert sellers. As a consequence, consumers are often exploited and market efficiency is threatened. However, in the digital age, it has become easy and cheap for consumers to self-diagnose...

We study the design of market information in competing-mechanism games. We identify a new dimension, private disclosures, whereby the principals asymmetrically inform the agents of how their mechanisms operate. We show that private disclosures have two important effects. First, they can raise a...

We show that limited dealer participation in the market, coupled with an informational friction resulting from high frequency trading, can induce demand for liquidity to be upward sloping and strategic complementarities in traders' liquidity consumption decisions: traders demand more liquidity...