We examine the impact of a large, randomized Girls' Education Challenge (GEC) project in rural Zimbabwe. The multifaceted project initially provided information about girls' rights and education barriers to girls, parents, teachers, and others. Later, the project introduced a learn-to-read...

We develop a model of lobbying in which a time and resource constrained policymaker first chooses which policy proposals to learn about, before choosing which to implement. The policymaker reviews the proposals of the interest groups who provide the highest contributions. We study how policy...

We challenge the prevailing view that pure informational lobbying (in the absence of political contributions and evidence distortion or withholding) leads to better informed policymaking. In the absence of lobbying, the policymaker may prioritize the more-important or ex ante morepromising...

We develop a model of policymaking in which a politician decides how much expertise to acquire or how informed to become about issues before interest groups engage in monetary lobbying. For a range of issues, the policymaker prefers to remain clueless about the merits of reform, even when...

A number of recent studies show that males may increase their performance by more than females in response to competitive incentives. The literature suggests that such a male competitive advantage may contribute to observed gender gaps in labor force pay and achievement. Understanding which...

An organization must decide which proposals to fund. In evaluating the proposals, the organization may rely on those applying for funding to produce evidence about the merits of their own proposals. We consider the role of a capacity constraint preventing the organization from funding all...

We incorporate product demonstrations into a game theoretic model of firm price competition. Demonstrations may include product samples, trials, return policies, reviews, or any other means by which a firm allows consumers to learn about their value for a new product. In our model,...

Pre-College human capital investment occurs within a competitive environment and depends on market incentives created by Affirmative Action (AA) in college admissions. These policies affect mechanisms for rank-order allocation of college seats, and alter the relative competition between blacks...

In a variety of settings, budgets are set by a committee that interacts repeatedly over many budget cycles. To capture this, we study a model of repeated multilateral bargaining by a budget committee. Our focus is on the transition of agenda setting power from one cycle to the next, and how such...