Suchergebnisse

We formalize the argument that political disagreements can be traced to a "clash of narratives." Drawing on the "Bayesian Networks" literature, we represent a narrative by a causal model that maps actions into consequences, weaving a selection of other random variables into the story. Narratives generate beliefs by interpreting long-run correlations between these variables. An equilibrium is defined as a probability distribution over narrative-policy pairs that maximize a representative agent's anticipatory utility, capturing the idea that people are drawn to hopeful narratives. Our equilibrium analysis sheds light on the structure of prevailing narratives, the variables they involve, the policies they sustain, and their contribution to political polarization. (JEL D72, D83, D85, F52)

AbstractNonretail platforms enable users to engage in noncommercial activities, while generating user information that helps ad targeting. We present a model in which the platform chooses a personalized ad‐display rule and an advertising fee (which depends on the targeted user group). The policy that maximizes the platform's advertising revenues creates an incentive for advertisers to strategize targeting. We provide a condition for incentive‐compatibility of the first‐best policy, and highlight the forces that make it harder to satisfy. We apply our result to examples of platforms. Our analysis of social networks turns out to be related to the "community‐detection" problem.

We study decentralized mechanisms for allocating firms into search pools. The pools are created in response to noisy preference signals provided by consumers, who then browse the pools via costly random sequential search. Surplus-maximizing search pools are implementable in symmetric Nash equilibrium. Full extraction of the maximal surplus is implementable if and only if the distribution of consumer types satisfies a set of simple inequalities, which involve the relative fractions of consumers who like different products and the Bhattacharyya coefficient of similarity between their conditional signal distributions. The optimal mechanism can be simulated by a keyword auction with broad matching. (JEL C78, D44, D82)

A key feature of arbitration is the possibility for conflicting parties to participate in the selection of the arbitrator, the individual who will rule the case. We analyze this problem of the selection of arbitrators from the perspective of implementation theory. In particular, theoretical analyses document problems with veto-rank—a simultaneous procedure commonly used in practice—and develop a new sequential procedure—shortlisting—with better properties. Experimental results are consistent with the theoretical predictions, highlighting both the disadvantages associated with the veto-rank procedure and the advantages associated with the shortlisting procedure. (JEL D71, D72)