We analyze the offering, asking, and granting of help or other benefits as a three-stage game with bilateral private information between a person in need of help and a potential help-giver. Asking entails the risk of rejection, which can be painful: since unawareness of the need can no longer be...

Employer learning about workers' abilities plays a key role in determining how workers sort into jobs and are compensated. This study explores whether learning is symmetric or asymmetric, i.e., whether potential employers have the same information about worker ability as the incumbent firm. I...

This paper extends the job market signaling model of Spence (1973) by allowing firms to learn the ability of their employees over time. Contrary to the model without employer learning, we find that the Intuitive Criterion does not always select a unique separating equilibrium. When the Intuitive...

Embezzlement is a major concern in various settings. By means of a sequential modified dictator game, we investigate theoretically and experimentally whether making information more transparent and reducing the number of intermediaries in transfer chains can reduce embezzlement and improve the...

The social and the private returns to education differ when education can increase productivity, and also be used to signal productivity. We show how instrumental variables can be used to separately identify and estimate the social and private returns to education within the employer learning...

In a market in which sellers compete by posting mechanisms, we study how the properties of the meeting technology affect the mechanism that sellers select. In general, sellers have incentive to use mechanisms that are socially efficient. In our environment, sellers achieve this by posting an...

In this paper we show that subtle forms of deceit undermine the effectiveness of incentives.We design an experiment in which the principal has an interest in underreporting the trueperformance difference between the agents in a dynamic tournament...

In this paper, we analyze a principal's optimal feedback policy in tournaments. We close agap in the literature by assuming the principal to be unable to commit to a certain policy atthe beginning of the tournament...

Many people remain opposed to climate change mitigation policies. This opposition is an obstacle to policy action and, therefore, important to understand. We explore how unusually high temperatures (heat waves), which observably increase the salience of climate change-related issues, affect...

In a randomized field experiment, we provide personalized suggestions about suitable alternative occupations to long-term unemployed job seekers in the UK. The suggestions are automatically generated, integrated in an online job search platform, and fed into actual search queries. Effects on the...