Contributions in Merlin

We use laboratory experiments to test for one of the foundations of the rational voter paradigm - that voters respond to probabilities of being pivotal. We exploit a setup that entails stark theoretical effects of information concerning the preference distribution (as revealed through polls) on costly participation decisions. The data reveal several insights. First, voting propensity increases systematically with subjects' predictions of their preferred alternative's advantage. Consequently, pre-election polls do not exhibit the detrimental welfare effects that extant theoretical work predicts. They lead to more participation by the expected majority and generate more landslide elections. Finally, we investigate subjects' behavior in polls and identify when Bandwagon and Underdog Effects arise.

This paper examines whether and how cheap talk communication can facilitate within-group coordination when two unequal sized groups compete for a prize that is shared equally among members of the winning group, regardless of their (costly) contributions to the group’s success. We find that allowing group members to communicate before making contribution decisions improves coordination. To measure how much miscoordination remains, we employ a control treatment where miscoordination is eliminated by asking group members to reach a unanimous contribution decision. Average group contributions are not significantly different in this control treatment. Cheap talk communication thus completely solves miscoordination within groups and makes group members act as a single agent. Furthermore, it is the larger group that benefits from communication at the expense of the smaller group. Finally, content analysis of group communication reveals that after the reduction of within-group strategic uncertainty, groups reach self-enforcing agreements on how much to contribute, designate specific contributors according to a rotation scheme, and quickly discover the logic of the mixed-strategy equilibrium.

This paper reports results from a series of laboratory experiments designed to evaluate the impact of exposure risk on market performance. Exposure risk arises when there are complementarities between trades, e.g. when the purchase of a new house requires selling the old one. The continuous double auction (CDA), which has proven to be remarkably effective in a wide variety of settings, performs poorly in a treatment with high exposure risk: overall market efficiency is only 20% and there are many instances of no trade. In a parallel treatment with lower exposure risk, efficiency under the CDA is higher (55%) but is dominated, for instance, by a top-trading-cycles procedure that uses no money. The CDA's poor performance does not depend on whether house values are private information or common knowledge, indicating that exposure risk is due to strategic uncertainty not objective uncertainty about others' preferences. We introduce a simple package market and show that it effectively resolves exposure risk: efficiency levels are 82% and 89% respectively for the low and high exposure treatments. The proposed package market is a simple extension of the CDA and could potentially be applied in a variety contexts.

Traders' values and information typically consist of both private and common-value elements. In such environments, full allocative efficiency is impossible when the private rate of information substitution differs from the social rate (Jehiel and Moldovanu, 2001). We link this impossibility result to a failure of the efficient market hypothesis, which states that prices adequately reflect all available information (Fama, 1970, 1991). The intuition is that if prices were able to reveal all information then the common value would simply shift traders' private values by a known constant and full allocative efficiency would result. In a series of laboratory experiments we study price formation in markets with private and common values. Rational expectations, which form the basis for the efficient market hypothesis, predict that the introduction of common values has no adverse consequences for allocative and informational efficiency. In contrast, a "private" expectations model in which traders' optimal behavior depends on both their private and common-value information predicts that neither full allocative nor full informational efficiency is possible. We test these competing hypotheses and find that the introduction of common values lowers allocative efficiency by 28% on average, as predicted by the private expectations model, and that market prices differ significantly and substantially from their rational expectation levels. Finally, a comparison of observed and predicted payoffs suggests that observed behavior is close to the equilibrium predicted by the private expectations model.

A key aspect of generating new ideas is drawing from different elements of preexisting knowledge and combining them into a new idea. In such a process, the diversity of ideas plays a central role. This paper examines the empirical question of how the internet affected the diversity of new research by making the existing literature accessible online. The internet marks a technological shock which affects how academic scientists search for and browse through published documents. Using article-level data from economics journals for the period 1991 to 2009, we document how online accessibility lead academic economists to draw from a more diverse set of literature, and to write articles which incorporated more diverse contents.

This paper investigates how precisely short-term, job-search oriented training programs as opposed to long-term, human capital intensive training programs work. We evaluate and compare their effects on time until job entry, stability of employment, and earnings. Further, we examine the heterogeneity of treatment effects according to the timing of training during unemployment as well as across different subgroups of participants. We find that participating in short-term training reduces the remaining time in unemployment and moderately increases job stability. Long-term training programs initially prolong the remaining time in unemployment, but once the scheduled program end is reached participants exit to employment at a much faster rate than without training. In addition, they benefit from substantially more stable employment spells and higher earnings. Overall, long-term training programs are well effective in supporting the occupational advancement of very heterogeneous groups of participants, including those with generally weak labor market prospects. However, from a fiscal perspective only the low-cost short-term training schemes are cost efficient in the short run.

The mispricing of marketing performance indicators (such as brand equity, churn, and customer satisfaction) is an important element of arguments in favor of the financial value of marketing investments. Evidence for mispricing can be assessed by examining whether or not portfolios composed of firms that load highly on marketing performance indicators deliver excess returns. Unfortunately, extant portfolio formation methods that require the use of a risk model are open to the criticism of time-varying risk factor loadings due to the changing composition of the portfolio over time. This is a serious critique, as the direction of the induced bias is unknown. As an alternative, we propose a new method and construct portfolios that are neutral with respect to the desired risk factors a priori. Consequently, no risk model is needed when analyzing the observed returns of our portfolios. We apply our method to a frequently studied marketing performance indicator, customer satisfaction. Using various ways of measuring customer satisfaction, we do not find any convincing evidence that portfolios that load on high customer satisfaction lead to abnormal returns.

In this paper, we test how reporting behaviors (response time, cognitive effort, questionnaire order) affect reported happiness in a large Dutch internet panel survey. We find that slower responses and higher cognitive effort reduce reported happiness. Moreover, in multivariate happiness equations, these factors moderate the estimated effect of income on happiness, while no interaction effects are found for other determinants of happiness. As a consequence, relative marginal effects may not be invariant to reporting circumstances.

The failure of uncovered interest rate parity to explain short-term interest rate movements is well documented. We show that short-term changes in long-term interest rates do help to explain short-term exchange rate movements. The relationship gets stronger over our sample period, as the liquidity of the exchange rate market increases. We also show that controlling for time-varying exchange rate risk also helps to improve the fit of the relationship.

In spite of the fact that they can draw on a larger, more liquid and more diversiedpool of capital than the equity of reinsurance companies, nancial markets have failedto displace reinsurance as the primary risk-sharing vehicle for natural catastropherisk. We show that this failure can be explained by dierences in information gatheringincentives between nancial markets and reinsurance companies. Using a simple modelof an insurance company that seeks to transfer a fraction of its risk exposure eitherthrough nancial markets or through traditional reinsurance, we nd that the supplyof information by informed traders in nancial markets may be excessive relative to itsvalue for the insurance company, causing reinsurance to be preferred. We show thatwhether traditional reinsurance or nancial markets are ultimately selected dependscrucially on the information acquisition cost structure and on the degree of redundancyin the information produced. Limits on the ability of informed traders to protablytake advantage of their information make the use of nancial markets more likely.