AEJ: Microeconomics 2024年 11月刊 目录与摘要
刊发卷期：Vol. 16, Issue 4
刊发时间：November 2024
期刊等级：ABS 3
出版厂商：American Economic Association
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目录
1. The Status Quo and Belief Polarization of Inattentive Agents: Theory and Experiment
Vladimír Novák, Andrei Matveenko, and Silvio Ravaioli
2. Consistent Depth of Reasoning in Level-k Models
David J. Cooper, Enrique Fatas, Antonio J. Morales, and Shi Qi
3. A New Era of Midnight Mergers: Antitrust Risk and Investor Disclosures
John M. Barrios and Thomas G. Wollmann
4. Noncompete Agreements and the Welfare of Consumers
Michael Lipsitz and Mark J. Tremblay
5. Dual Moral Hazard and the Tyranny of Success
Enrique Ide
6. Recovering the Anchoring of Economic Valuations
Liang Guo
7. Bargaining in the Shadow of Uncertainty
Marina Agranov, Hülya Eraslan, and Chloe Tergiman
8. Fair Shares and Selective Attention
Dianna R. Amasino, Davide D. Pace, and Joël J. van der Weele
9. A Revealed Preference Test for Choquet and Max-Min Expected Utility with Ambiguity Aversion
Thomas Demuynck and Clément Staner
10. The Inverse Product Differentiation Logit Model
Mogens Fosgerau, Julien Monardo, and André de Palma
11. Secure Survey Design in Organizations: Theory and Experiments
Sylvain Chassang and Christian Zehnder
12. Decentralized Matching with Transfers: Experimental and Noncooperative Analyses
Simin He, Jiabin Wu, Hanzhe Zhang, and Xun Zhu
13. Corrupted Votes and Rule Compliance
Arno Apffelstaedt ⓡ Jana Freundt
14. On Optimal Scheduling
Kfir Eliaz, Daniel Fershtman, and Alexander Frug
摘要
1. The Status Quo and Belief Polarization of Inattentive Agents: Theory and Experiment
Vladimír Novák, Andrei Matveenko, and Silvio Ravaioli
We show that rational but inattentive agents can become polarized ex ante. We present how optimal information acquisition and subsequent belief formation depend crucially on the agent-specific status quo valuation. Beliefs can systematically—in expectations over all possible signal realizations conditional on the state of the world—update away from the realized truth, and even agents with the same initial beliefs might become polarized. We design a laboratory experiment to test the model's predictions. The results confirm our predictions about the mechanism (rational information acquisition) and its effect on beliefs (systematic polarization), and they provide general insights into demand for information.
2. Consistent Depth of Reasoning in Level-k Models
David J. Cooper, Enrique Fatas, Antonio J. Morales, and Shi Qi
Level-k models often assume that individuals employ a fixed depth of reasoning across different games. We study this assumption by having subjects make choices in five classes of games chosen to identify inconsistent depth of reasoning. We demonstrate that depth of reasoning is pervasively inconsistent, changing both within and between classes of games. We show that this cannot easily be explained by factors such as subject confusion, changing beliefs about others' depth of reasoning, stochastic choice, model misspecification, changing incentives, or low cognitive ability. We develop a simple model incorporating ambiguity aversion that predicts inconsistent depth of reasoning.
3. A New Era of Midnight Mergers: Antitrust Risk and Investor Disclosures
John M. Barrios and Thomas G. Wollmann
Antitrust authorities search public documents to discover anti-competitive mergers. Thus, investor disclosures may alert them to deals that would otherwise go undetected, creating disincentives for managers to divulge certain transactions. We study this behavior in publicly traded US companies. First, we employ a regression discontinuity approach to estimate the effect of mandatory disclosures. We find that releasing information to investors poses antitrust risk. Second, we introduce a method for measuring undisclosed mergers that relies on financial accounting reporting requirements. We find that undisclosed mergers total $1.85 trillion between 2002 and 2016.
4. Noncompete Agreements and the Welfare of Consumers
Michael Lipsitz and Mark J. Tremblay
Employee spin-offs harm incumbent firms by increasing competition (benefiting consumers) and preventing firm owners from making beneficial investments in workers who may later spin off (harming consumers). We model noncompete agreements (NCAs) as solutions for the firm and analyze the resulting trade-off for consumers. We show that market structure and the nature of investment play large roles. Counterintuitively, increased investment benefits have the potential to harm consumers such that industries where firms value NCAs the most are those where harm is greater. Finally, we draw two analogies between NCAs and antitrust and show how those areas inform NCA policy.
5. Dual Moral Hazard and the Tyranny of Success
Enrique Ide
I explain why current success can undermine an organization's ability to innovate. I consider a standard bandit problem between a safe and a risky arm with two modifications. First, a principal allocates resources. Second, an agent must install the risky arm, which is not contractible. If the principal cannot commit to a resource policy, a dual moral hazard problem emerges: The agent's pay must be tied to the risky arm's success to encourage installation, inducing the principal to stop experimenting with the arm prematurely. This problem intensifies as the safe arm becomes more profitable, potentially leaving the organization worse off.
6. Recovering the Anchoring of Economic Valuations
Liang Guo
We revisit the interpretation of the anchoring effect as evidence for nonexisting or arbitrary preferences. A theory of endogenous information acquisition (i.e., deliberation) is developed to rationalize the causal dependence of economic valuations on arbitrary anchor numbers. We identify theory-driven moderators to reconcile seemingly discrepant findings among original and follow-up anchoring experiments. We demonstrate in a meta-analysis that the anchoring effect may be systematically moderated by unintended experimental/individual differences. Moreover, apparent replication failure of the anchoring effect may be a false negative for self-countervailing treatment effects, because an anchoring treatment may cast opposite effects on different subjects within an experiment.
7. Bargaining in the Shadow of Uncertainty
Marina Agranov, Hülya Eraslan, and Chloe Tergiman
In bargaining environments with stochastic future surplus, failing to delay agreement can be inefficient when the expected future surplus is sufficiently high. Theoretically, such inefficiencies never arise under unanimity rule but can arise under majority rule. Using a laboratory experiment, we find support for these predictions, both when the unanimity rule is predicted to be more efficient and when there should be no difference between the two rules. We also find large point prediction deviations under the majority rule. We show these deviations can be explained by higher-than-predicted egalitarian sharing and a lower risk of being excluded from future agreements.
8. Fair Shares and Selective Attention
Dianna R. Amasino, Davide D. Pace, and Joël J. van der Weele
Attitudes toward fairness and redistribution differ along socioeconomic lines. To understand their formation, we conduct a large-scale experiment on attention to merit and luck and the effect of attention on fairness decisions. Randomly advantaged subjects pay less attention to information about true merit and retain more economic surplus, and this effect persists in subsequent impartial decisions. Attention also has a causal role: encouraging subjects to look at merit reduces the effect of an advantaged position on allocations. This suggests that attention-based policy interventions may be effective in reducing polarized views on inequality.
9. A Revealed Preference Test for Choquet and Max-Min Expected Utility with Ambiguity Aversion
Thomas Demuynck and Clément Staner
We develop a revealed preference test for the Choquet expected utility model with ambiguity aversion, which does not rely on specific functional form assumptions on the utility index. It is computationally efficient if the number of states is not too large, even for a large number of observations. This is a nice feature compared to other existing revealed preference tests for decision models with ambiguity. We illustrate the usefulness of our results by implementing our test on two experimental datasets from the literature, and we compare the empirical fit of this model to the subjective expected utility model.
10. The Inverse Product Differentiation Logit Model
Mogens Fosgerau, Julien Monardo, and André de Palma
We introduce the inverse product differentiation logit (IPDL) model, a micro-founded inverse market share model for differentiated products that captures market segmentation according to one or more characteristics. The IPDL model generalizes the nested logit model to allow richer substitution patterns, including complementarity in demand, and can be estimated by linear instrumental variable regression with market-level data. Furthermore, we provide Monte Carlo experiments comparing the IPDL model to the workhorse empirical models of the literature. Lastly, we demonstrate the empirical performance of the IPDL model using a well-known dataset on the ready-to-eat cereal market.
11. Secure Survey Design in Organizations: Theory and Experiments
Sylvain Chassang and Christian Zehnder
We study secure survey designs in organizational settings where fear of retaliation makes it hard to elicit truth. Theory predicts that (i) randomized-response techniques offer no improvement because they are strategically equivalent to direct elicitation, (ii) exogenously distorting survey responses (hard garbling) can improve information transmission, and (iii) the impact of survey design on reporting can be estimated in equilibrium. Laboratory experiments confirm that hard garbling outperforms direct elicitation but randomized response works better than expected. False accusations slightly but persistently bias treatment effect estimates. Additional experiments reveal that play converges to equilibrium if learning from others' experience is possible.
12. Decentralized Matching with Transfers: Experimental and Noncooperative Analyses
Simin He, Jiabin Wu, Hanzhe Zhang, and Xun Zhu
We experimentally examine the Becker-Shapley-Shubik two-sided matching model. In the experiment, the aggregate outcomes of matching and surplus are affected by whether equal split is in the core and whether efficient matching is assortative; the canonical cooperative theory predicts no effect. In markets with an equal number of participants on both sides, individual payoffs cannot be explained by existing refinements of the core, but are consistent with our noncooperative model's predictions. In markets with unequal numbers of participants, noncompetitive outcomes, are not captured by the canonical cooperative model, but are included in the set of predictions in our noncooperative model.
13. Corrupted Votes and Rule Compliance
Arno Apffelstaedt ⓡ Jana Freundt
Allegations of voter fraud accompany many real-world elections. How does electoral malpractice affect the acceptance of elected institutions? Using an online experiment in which participants distribute income according to majority-elected rules, we show that those who experience vote buying or voter disenfranchisement during the election are subsequently less likely to voluntarily comply with a rule. On average, the detrimental impact of electoral malpractice on compliance is of the same magnitude as removing the election altogether and imposing a rule exogenously. Our experiment shows how corrupting democratic processes impacts economic behavior and sheds light on factors that may underlie "rule legitimacy."
14. On Optimal Scheduling
Kfir Eliaz, Daniel Fershtman, and Alexander Frug
We consider a decision-maker sequentially choosing among alternatives when periodic payoffs depend on both chosen and unchosen alternatives in that period. We show that when flow payoffs are the sum or product of payoffs from chosen and unchosen alternatives, the optimal policy is an index policy. We characterize key properties of the optimal dynamics and present an algorithm for computing the indices explicitly. Furthermore, we use the results to generalize Weitzman's (1979) classic "Pandora's boxes" problem to allow for complementarities. We illustrate the framework's usefulness through applications, including decision problems with disappearing alternatives, repeated bargaining, dynamic supervision, and dynamic occupational choice.
