We study when equilibrium prices can aggregate information in an auction market with a large population of traders. Our main result identifies a property of information—the betweenness property that is both necessary and sufficient for information aggregation. The characterization provides...

Siga and Mihm (2020) characterize the information environments where prices can aggregate information in a competitive auction market with an atomless population of traders. In this paper, we provide an explicit model of the large population where implications of the law of large numbers for...

Many policy reforms involve gains for some voters at a cost borne by others, and voters may be asymmetrically informed about who gains and loses. This paper shows that the interaction of distributive politics and asymmetric information generates an adverse selection effect: when an uninformed...

Many policies, such as trade and immigration, bear important consequences for both the size and distribution of surplus. Oftentimes, people are asked to vote on these policies despite not being all that well-informed about the consequences. This paper studies the extent to which an electorate...

In a dynamic choice environment, an agent's tastes may change over time (e.g., due to present bias, habit formation, or reference dependence). These changes are often systematic with important welfare and policy implications. In this paper, we propose a framework to identify an agent's...

We show how information acquisition costs can be identified using observable choice data. Identifying information costs from behavior is especially relevant when these costs depend on factors-such as time, effort, and cognitive resources-that are difficult to observe directly, as in models of...