We present a model of market competition in which consumers' attention is drawn to the products' most salient attributes. Firms compete for consumer attention via their choices of quality and price. Strategic positioning of a product affects how all other products are perceived. With this attention externality, depending on the cost of producing quality some markets exhibit "commoditized" price salient equilibria, while others exhibit "de-commoditized" quality salient equilibria. When the costs of quality change, innovation can lead to radical shifts in markets, as in the case of decommoditization of the coffee market by Starbucks. In the context of financial innovation, the model generates the phenomenon of "reaching for yield".

Firms lobby the U.S. Congress to influence policy-making. This paper quantifies the extent to which lobbying expenditures affect policy enactment. First, I construct a novel dataset comprised of federal energy legislation and lobbying activities by the energy sector during the 110th Congress. Second, I develop and estimate a game- theoretic model where heterogeneous players choose lobbying expenditures to affect the probability that a policy is enacted. I find that the effect of lobbying expenditures on a policy's equilibrium enactment probability is very small. However, the average returns from lobbying expenditures are estimated to be over 140

The increase in the information that firms can collect or purchase about network effects across consumers motivates two important questions: how does a firm's pricing strategy react to detailed information on network effects? Are the availability and use of such information beneficial or detrimental to consumer surplus? We develop a model in which a monopoly sells a network good and price discriminates based on information about consumers' influence and consumers' susceptibility to influence. The monopoly optimally offers consumers price discounts for their influence and charges price premia for their susceptibility; the price premia and the price discounts are simple functions of the pattern of network effects. We determine under which conditions, relative to uniform price, consumer surplus increases, and we characterize the value of information on network effects for the monopoly.

We introduce a model of strategic thinking in games of initial response. Unlike standard models of strategic thinking, in this framework the player's “depth of reasoning” is endogenously determined, and it can be disentangled from his beliefs over his opponent's cognitive bound. In our approach, individuals act as if they follow a cost–benefit analysis. The depth of reasoning is a function of the player's cognitive abilities and his payoffs. The costs are exogenous and represent the game-theoretical sophistication of the player; the benefit instead is related to the game payoffs. Behaviour is in turn determined by the individual's depth of reasoning and his beliefs about the reasoning process of the opponent. Thus, in our framework, payoffs not only affect individual choices in the traditional sense, but they also shape the cognitive process itself. Our model delivers testable implications on players' chosen actions as incentives and opponents change. We then test the model's predictions with an experiment. We administer different treatments that vary beliefs over payoffs and opponents, as well as beliefs over opponents' beliefs. The results of this experiment, which are not accounted for by current models of reasoning in games, strongly support our theory. We also show that the predictions of our model are highly consistent, both qualitatively and quantitatively, with well-known unresolved empirical puzzles. Our approach therefore serves as a novel, unifying framework of strategic thinking that allows for predictions across games.

Prices tend to remain constant for a period of time and then jump. In the literature, this “rigidity” is usually interpreted to reflect a cost of adjusting prices. This article shows that price rigidity can alternatively reflect optimal price setting when there are no adjustment costs, namely, if the seller is rationally inattentive. The model generates non-trivial pricing patterns that are consistent with the data and that are hard to explain with the traditional adjustment-cost model. In particular, prices are adjusted frequently but move back and forth between a few given values, hazard functions are downward sloping, and responses to persistent shocks are sluggish. These results are obtained in a model that implements rational inattention without simplifying assumptions on the functional forms of the processed signals.

In large-scale panel data models with latent factors the number of factors and their loadings may change over time. Treating the break date as unknown, this article proposes an adaptive group-LASSO estimator that consistently determines the numbers of pre- and post-break factors and the stability of factor loadings if the number of factors is constant. We develop a cross-validation procedure to fine-tune the data-dependent LASSO penalties and show that after the number of factors has been determined, a conventional least-squares approach can be used to estimate the break date consistently. The method performs well in Monte Carlo simulations. In an empirical application, we study the change in factor loadings and the emergence of new factors in a panel of U.S. macroeconomic and financial time series during the Great Recession.

Using micro-data from 48 developing countries, this article studies changes in cross-sectional patterns of fertility and child investment over the demographic transition. Before 1960, children from larger families obtained more education, in large part because they had richer and more educated parents. By century's end, these patterns had reversed. Consequently, fertility differentials by income and education historically raised the average education of the next generation, but they now reduce it. Relative to the level of average education, the positive effect of differential fertility in the past exceeded its negative effect in the present. While the reversal of differential fertility is unrelated to changes in GDP per capita, women's work, sectoral composition, or health, roughly half is attributable to rising aggregate education in the parents' generation. The data are consistent with a model in which fertility has a hump-shaped relationship with parental skill, due to a corner solution in which low-skill parents forgo investment in their children. As the returns to child investment rise, the peak of the relationship shifts to the left, reversing the associations under study

This article studies the structural transformation of Russia in 1885–1940 from an agrarian to an industrial economy through the lens of a two-sector neoclassical growth model. We construct a data set that covers Tsarist Russia during 1885–1913 and Soviet Union during 1928–1940. We develop a methodology that allows us to identify the types of frictions and economic mechanisms that had the largest quantitative impact on Russian economic development. We find that entry barriers and monopoly power in the non-agricultural sector were the most important reason for Tsarist Russia’s failure to industrialize before World War I. Soviet industrial transformation after 1928 was achieved primarily by reducing such frictions, albeit coinciding with a significantly lower performance of productivity in both agricultural and non-agricultural sectors. We find no evidence that Tsarist agricultural institutions were a significant barrier to labour reallocation to manufacturing, or that “Big Push” mechanisms were a major driver of Soviet growth.

This article derives novel testable implications of referral-based job search networks in which employees provide employers with information about potential new hires that they otherwise would not have. Using comprehensive matched employer–employee data covering the entire workforce in one large metropolitan labour market combined with unique survey data linked to administrative records, we provide evidence that workers earn higher wages and are less inclined to leave their firms if they have obtained their job through a referral. These effects are particularly strong at the beginning of the employment relationship and decline with tenure in the firm, suggesting that firms and workers learn about workers' productivity over time. Overall, our findings imply that job search networks help to reduce informational deficiencies in the labour market and lead to productivity gains for workers and firms.

In this article, we examine the effect of “choice fatigue” on decision making. We exploit a natural experiment in which voters face the same contest at different ballot positions due to differences in the number of local issues on their ballot. Facing more decisions before a given contest significantly increases the tendency to abstain or rely on decision shortcuts, such as voting for the status quo or the first-listed candidate. We estimate that, without choice fatigue, abstentions would decrease by 8%, and 6% of the propositions in our data set would have passed rather than failed.