Novel early stage ideas face uncertainty on the expertise needed to elaborate them, which creates a need to circulate them widely to find a match. Yet as information is not excludable, shared ideas may be stolen, reducing incentives to innovate. Still, in idea-rich environments inventors may...

We model a financial market in which investor beliefs are shaped by representativeness. Investors overreact to a series of good news, because such a series is representative of a good state. A few bad news do not change investor minds because the good state is still representative, but enough...

We present a new model of money management, in which investors delegate portfolio management to professionals based not only on performance, but also on trust. Trust in the manager reduces an investor's perception of the riskiness of a given investment, and allows managers to charge higher fees...

We present a theory of context-dependent choice in which a consumer's attention is drawn to salient attributes of goods, such as quality or price. An attribute is salient for a good when it stands out among the good's characteristics, in the precise sense of being furthest away in that good from...

We present a simple model of asset pricing in which payoff salience drives investors' demand for risky assets. The key implication is that extreme payoffs receive disproportionate weight in the market valuation of assets. The model accounts for several puzzles in finance in an intuitive way,...

We use a newly assembled sample of 1,503 regions from 82 countries to compare the speed of per capita income convergence within and across countries. Regional growth is shaped by similar factors as national growth, such as geography and human capital. Regional convergence is about 2.5% per year,...

We present a model of stereotypes in which a decision maker assessing a group recalls only that group's most representative or distinctive types relative to other groups. Because stereotypes highlight differences between groups, and neglect likely common types, they are especially inaccurate...

We present a model of market competition and product differentiation in which consumers' attention is drawn to the products' most salient attributes. Firms compete for consumer attention via their choices of quality and price. With salience, strategic positioning of each product affects how all...

Does it matter for the outcome of a trial who the judge is? Legal practitioners typically believe that the answer is yes, yet legal scholarship sees trial judges as predictably enforcing established law. Following Frank (1951), we suggest here that trial judges exercise considerable discretion...

We investigate the evolution of common law under overruling, a system of precedent change in which appellate courts replace existing legal rules with new ones. We use a legal realist model, in which judges change the law to reflect their own preferences or attitudes, but changing the law is...