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This paper reports the results of a statistical summary of estimates of the marginal willingness to pay (MWTP) for reducing particulate matter from hedonic property value models developed between 1967 and 1988. Results using both ordinary least squares and minimum absolute deviation estimators suggest that market conditions and the procedures used to implement the hedonic models were important to the resulting MWTP estimates. The interquartile range for these estimated marginal values (measured as a change in asset prices) lies between zero and $98.52 (in 1982-84 dollars) for a one-unit reduction in total suspended particulates (in micrograms per cubic meter). The mean MWTP is nearly five times the median ($109.90 vs. $22.40), suggesting that outliers are important influences to any summary statistics for these estimates

During adolescence, peer interactions become increasingly central to children’s development, whereas the direct influence of parents wanes. Nevertheless, parents can continue to exert leverage by shaping their children’s peer groups. We construct and estimate a model of parenting with peer and neighborhood effects where parents intervene in peer formation and show that the model captures empirical patterns of skill accumulation, parenting style, and peer characteristics among US high school students. We find that interventions that move children to better neighborhoods lose impact when they are scaled up, because parents’ equilibrium responses push against successful integration with the new peer group.

We analyze a nonlinear pricing model where the seller controls both product pricing (screening) and buyer information about their own values (persuasion). We prove that the optimal mechanism always consists of finitely many signals and items, even with a continuum of buyer values. The seller optimally pools buyer values and reduces product variety to minimize informational rents. We show that value pooling is optimal even for finite value distributions if their entropy exceeds a critical threshold. We also provide sufficient conditions under which the optimal menu restricts offering to a single item.

We provide an organizational economics foundation for commitment to information structures in persuasion. An uninformed principal faces a joint screening-and-persuasion problem: she wants to influence a receiver’s beliefs about a payoff-relevant state using information elicited from a privately informed agent. The principal cannot act as an intermediary that commits to an optimal garbling of the agent’s private communications; instead, the agent’s messages are all publicly observed by the receiver. We show that the principal can still (indirectly) implement the optimal unconstrained intermediation scheme. Commitment only to an employment contract with the agent suffices for optimal persuasion of the receiver. We apply our result to the context of a brokerage contracting with a sell-side analyst, where private communication is constrained by conflict-of-interest regulations. We show that a public communication scheme—which closely corresponds to the investment ratings schemes observed in practice—can sidestep these regulations.

Algorithm designers increasingly optimize not only for accuracy, but also for the fairness of the algorithm across pre-defined groups. We study the tradeoff between fairness and accuracy for any given set of inputs to the algorithm. We propose and characterize a fairness-accuracy frontier, which consists of the optimal points across a broad range of preferences over fairness and accuracy. Our results identify a simple property of the inputs, group-balance, which qualitatively determines the shape of the frontier. We further study an information-design problem where the designer flexibly regulates the inputs (e.g., by coarsening an input or banning its use) but the algorithm is chosen by another agent. Whether it is optimal to ban an input generally depends on the designer's preferences. But when inputs are group-balanced, then excluding group identity is strictly suboptimal for all designers, and when the designer has access to group identity, then it is strictly suboptimal to exclude any informative input.