We develop a theory that explains how and when privacy can increase welfare. Without privacy, some individuals misrepresent their preferences, because they will otherwise be statistically discriminated against. This "chilling effect" hurts them individually, and impairs information aggregation....

With the goal of maximizing expected gains from trade, this paper analyzes the jointly optimal information structure and mechanism in a bilateral trade setting. The difference in gains from trade between the optimal information structure and first best constitutes the minimal loss due to...

Why do people appear to forgo information by sorting into “echo chambers”? We construct a highly tractable multi-sender, multi-receiver cheap talk game in which players choose with whom to communicate. We show that segregation into small, homogeneous groups can improve everybody’s...

We provide a modeling framework to think about selective contracting in the health care sector. Two health care providers differ in quality and costs. When buying health insurance, consumers observe neither provider quality nor costs. We derive an equilibrium where health insurers signal...

We provide a modeling framework to think about selective contracting in the health care sector. Two health care providers differ in quality and costs. When buying health insurance, consumers observe neither provider quality nor costs. We derive an equilibrium where health insurers signal...

This paper studies competition in data-driven markets, that is, markets where the cost of quality production is decreasing in the amount of machine-generated data about user preferences or characteristics, which is an inseparable byproduct of using services offered in such markets. This gives...

We study a monopoly insurance model with endogenous information acquisition. Through a continuous effort choice, consumers can determine the precision of a privately observed signal that is informative about their accident risk. The equilibrium effort is, depending on parameter values, either...