Markets for lending and insurance incentivize good behavior by forecasting risk on the basis of past outcomes. As "big data" expands the set of covariates used to predict risk, how will these incentives change? We show that "attribute'' data which is informative about consumer quality tends to...

“Big data” gives markets access to previously unmeasured characteristics of individual agents. Policymakers must decide whether and how to regulate the use of this data. We study how new data affects incentives for agents to exert effort in settings such as the labor market, where an agent's...