Firms often try to influence individuals that, like regulators, are tasked with advising or deciding on behalf of a third party. In a dynamic regulatory setting, we show that a firm may prefer to capture regulators through the promise of a lucrative future job opportunity (i.e., the...

Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information concerning the needed and/or provided quality between experts and consumers. The functioning of the market heavily relies on trust on the side of the consumer as well as trustworthiness on the side of the expert. However, a great...

We examine whether collective memories on the aid&reform programs chosen to handle the 2010 European debt crisis differ between citizens from borrower and lender countries. We use new international survey data for non-experts and experts in member countries of the euro area. The results show...

Information provided by experts is widely believed to play a key role in shaping attitudes towards policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper uses a survey experiment to assess whether providing citizens with expert information about the health risk of COVID-19 and the economic costs...

Consumer needs change over time as a result of the fast-paced advancement in technology and the induction of the Internet, expansion that leads to a difficulty for brands to adapt their marketing promotion strategy and trying to remain innovative and effective at meeting their consumers’...

We use population administrative data from Sweden to study adherence to 63 medication-related guidelines. We compare the adherence of patients without personal access to medical expertise to the adherence of those with access, namely doctors and their close relatives. We estimate that, among...

Credence goods markets are characterized by asymmetric information concerning the needed and/or provided quality between experts and consumers. The functioning of the market heavily relies on trust on the side of the consumer as well as trustworthiness on the side of the expert. However, a great...

We examine whether collective memories on the aid&reform programs chosen to handle the 2010 European debt crisis differ between citizens from borrower and lender countries. We use new international survey data for non-experts and experts in member countries of the euro area. The results show...

Firms often try to influence individuals that, like regulators, are tasked with advising or deciding on behalf of a third party. In a dynamic regulatory setting, we show that a firm may prefer to capture regulators through the promise of a lucrative future job opportunity (i.e., the...

We examine the contribution of economic and institutional transitions as two potential sources of subnational economic growth in Spain. To this end, we exploit the economic reforms of the 1959 Stabilization Plan (as an example of technocratic, economy-oriented reform) and the democratic...

We experimentally investigate the strategic interaction between a product expert and a consumer. The expert privately chooses a ranking methodology to rank two products with uncertain relative merits; the consumer decides whether to acquire the resulting ranking report to guide her product...

A problem that has plagued market failure discussions is: "why does bad policy exist and persist?" Various schools of thought have answered that question, but I argue that the explanations, while correct, are incomplete. In this paper, I apply the expert failure literature to the problem of...

Experts’ opinions are widely considered for investment decisions. We collect textual information from cryptocurrency experts, study the dynamics in their discussion topics and their sentiment in relation to market movements. Based on the analysis we test various hypothesis which span if the...

A careerist expert advises a sequence of principals on their actions to match a hidden, randomly evolving state. The expert privately knows her competence. The principals learn about the state and the expert’s competence from past advice and past action outcomes, both publicly observable. I...

Firms have incentives to influence regulators' decisions. In a dynamic setting, we show that a firm may prefer to capture regulators through the promise of a lucrative future job opportunity (i.e., the revolving-door channel) than through a hidden payment (i.e., a bribe). This is because the...

Do experts adjust their policy recommendations when the facts change? We conduct a large-scale randomized experiment among 1,224 economic experts across 109 countries that includes two treatments. The first treatment is the geographic and temporal variation in the initial spread of Covid-19...

Die New-Skills-Gespräche des AMS werden im Auftrag der Abt. Arbeitsmarktforschung und Berufsinformation des AMS Österreich vom Österreichischen Institut für Berufsbildungsforschung gemeinsam mit dem Institut für Bildungsforschung der Wirtschaft umgesetzt. ExpertInnen aus Wirtschaft,...

We examine the heterogeneity of experts in a credence goods setting. In our analytical model, clients are ex ante uncertain about how much effort experts need to provide to solve their problem, which is either simple or difficult. Experts have varying degrees of expertise. Less qualified experts...

How do people choose what economic advice to heed? We develop a set of validated multiple-choice questions on economic policy problems, to examine empirically the persuasiveness of expert versus populist advice. We define populism as advice that conforms to commonly held beliefs, even when...

The international tax system developed as a form of technocratic governance, aimed at facilitating international investment, neglecting provisions for cooperation between national governments for tax enforcement. Its endogenous flaws resulted in its politicization in the 1970s, and again in the...

We find that acquirers create higher shareholder returns when advised by investment banks with more experience in the target industry. This finding is stronger when acquirers face more difficulties understanding and evaluating the targets. Further analyses show that these banks help acquirers...

Operational risk management remains a major concern for financial institutions. Indeed, institutions are bound to manage their own funds to hedge this risk. In this paper, we propose an approach to allocate one's own funds based on a combination of historical data and expert opinion using the...

Chapter 1 investigates how people's beliefs and investment behavior change in light of social information from their peers and from experts with a large-scale online experiment with participants from the U.S. and the U.K. I find that laypeople’s forecasts are strongly influenced by information...

We study a credence goods problem - that is, a moral hazard problem with non-contractible outcome - where altruistic experts (the agents) care both about their income and the utility of consumers (the principals). Experts' preferences over income and their consumers' utility are convex, such...

Appointing or electing professionals to be public officials is a double-edged sword. Experts can use their rich knowledge to implement reforms, but they can also favor their own profession. In this study, we compare physician-trained state health ministers to ministers of other professions in...

Firms have incentives to influence regulators' decisions. In a dynamic setting, we show that a firm may prefer to capture regulators through the promise of a lucrative future job opportunity (i.e., the revolving-door channel) than through a hidden payment (i.e., a bribe). This is because the...

Credence goods markets with their asymmetric information between buyers and sellers are prone to large inefficiencies. In theory, poorly informed consumers can protect themselves from maltreatment through sellers by asking for second opinions from other sellers. Yet, empirical evidence whether...

In credence goods markets, experts have better information about the appropriate quality of treatment than their customers. Experts may exploit their informational advantage by defrauding customers. Market institutions have been shown theoretically to be effective in mitigating fraudulent expert...

Credence goods markets with their asymmetric information between buyers and sellers are prone to large inefficiencies. In theory, poorly informed consumers can protect themselves from maltreatment through sellers by asking for second opinions from other sellers. Yet, empirical evidence whether...

Appointing or electing professionals to be public officials is a double-edged sword. Experts can use their rich knowledge to implement reforms, but they can also favor their own profession. In this study, we compare physician-trained state health ministers to ministers of other professions in...

Professional forecasters can rely on an econometric model to create their forecasts. It is usually unknown to what extent they adjust an econometric model-based forecast. In this paper we show, while making just two simple assumptions, that it is possible to estimate the persistence and variance...

When experts have superior information on their customers' needs and appropriate treatment/repair/advice is a credence good, there are obvious incentives for opportunistic behavior. What compounds this is that experts regularly make treatment recommendations and price offers only after consumers...