Party platforms in electoral competition with heterogeneous constituencies

This paper shows how political parties differentiate to reduce electoral competition. Two parties choose platforms in a unidimensional policy space, and then candidates from these parties compete for votes in a continuum of constituencies with different median voters. Departing from their parties' platforms is costly enough that candidates do not take the median voter's preferred position in every constituency. Because the candidate whose party is located closer to the median voter gets a higher expected payoff, parties acting in their candidates' best interests differentiate---when one party locates right of center, the other prefers to locate strictly left of center to carve out a "home turf,'' constituencies that can be won with little to no deviation from the platform of the candidate's party. Hence, competition that pulls candidates together pushes parties apart. Decreasing "campaign costs'' increases party differentiation as the leftist party must move further from the rightist party to carve out its home turf, as does increasing heterogeneity across constituencies.Political parties, median voter, Hotelling competition

Cursed Equilibrium

There is evidence that people do not fully take into account how other people’s actions are contingent on these others’ information. This paper defines and applies a new equilibrium concept in games with private information, "cursed equilibrium", which assumes that each player correctly predicts the distribution of other players’ actions, but underestimates the degree to which these actions are correlated with these other players’ information. We apply the concept to common-values auctions, where cursed equilibrium captures the widely observed phenomenon of the winner’s curse. We also show how cursed equilibrium predicts other empirically observed phenomena, such as trade in adverse- selection settings where conventional analysis predicts no trade, and "naïve" voting in elections and juries where rational-choice models predict that voters fully take into account the informational content in being pivotal.

Preferences for fair prices, cursed inferences, and the nonneutrality of money

This paper explains the nonneutrality of money from two assumptions: (1) consumers dislike paying prices that exceed some fair markup on firms’ marginal costs; and (2) consumers under infer marginal costs from available information. After an increase in money supply, consumers underappreciate the increase in nominal marginal costs and hence partially misattribute higher prices to higher markups; they perceive transactions as less fair, which increases the price elasticity of their demand for goods; firms respond by reducing markups; in equilibrium, output increases. By raising perceived markups, increased money supply inflicts a psychological cost on consumers that can offset the benefit of increased output

The curse of inflation

This paper proposes a model that explains the nonneutrality of money from two welldocumented psychological assumptions. The model incorporates into the general-equilibrium monopolistic-competition framework of Blanchard and Kiyotaki [1987] the psychological assumptions that (1) consumers dislike paying a price that exceeds some “fair” markup on firms’ marginal costs, and (2) consumers do not know firms’ marginal costs and fail to infer them from prices. The first assumption in isolation renders the economy more competitive without changing any of its qualitative properties; in particular, money remains neutral. The two assumptions together cause money to be nonneutral: greater money supply induces lower monopolistic markups, higher hours worked, and higher output. Whereas an increase in money supply is expansionary, it decreases the fairness of transactions perceived by consumers to such an extent that it reduces overall welfare. The cost of inflation is a psychological one that derives from a mistaken belief by consumers that transactions have become less fair. In fact, it is this misperception that makes an increase in money supply expansionary: consumers misattribute the higher prices arising from higher money supply to higher markups; the misperception of higher markups angers them and makes their demand for goods more elastic; in response, monopolists reduce their markups, thus stimulating economic activity. Through a similar mechanism, an increase in technology induces higher output but higher monopolistic markups and lower hours worked

An Experiment On Social Mislearning

We investigate experimentally whether social learners appreciate the redundancy of information conveyed by their observed predecessors' actions. Each participant observes a private signal and enters an estimate of the sum of all earlier-moving participants' signals plus her own. In a first treatment, participants move single-file and observe all predecessors' entries; Bayesian Nash Equilibrium (BNE) predicts that each participant simply add her signal to her immediate predecessor's entry. Although 75% of participants do so, redundancy neglect by the other 25% generates excess imitation and mild inefficiencies. In a second treatment, participants move four per period; BNE predicts that most players anti-imitate some observed entries. Such anti-imitation occurs in 35% of the most transparent cases, and 16% overall. The remaining redundancy neglect creates dramatic excess imitation and inefficiencies: late-period entries are far too extreme, and on average participants would earn substantially more by ignoring their predecessors altogether

Financial markets where traders neglect the informational content of prices

We model a financial market where some traders of a risky asset do not fully appreciate what prices convey about others' private information. Markets comprising solely such “cursed” traders generate more trade than those comprising solely rationals. Because rationals arbitrage away distortions caused by cursed traders, mixed markets can generate even more trade. Per-trader volume in cursed markets increases with market size; volume may instead disappear when traders infer others' information from prices, even when they dismiss it as noisier than their own. Making private information public raises rational and “dismissive” volume, but reduces cursed volume given moderate noninformational trading motives

Pricing under fairness concerns

This paper proposes a theory of pricing premised upon the assumptions that customers dislike unfair prices—those marked up steeply over cost—and that firms take these concerns into account when setting prices. Since they do not observe firms’ costs, customers must extract costs from prices. The theory assumes that customers infer less than rationally: when a price rises due to a cost increase, customers partially misattribute the higher price to a higher markup—which they find unfair. Firms anticipate this response and trim their price increases, which drives the passthrough of costs into prices below one: prices are somewhat rigid. Embedded in a New Keynesian model as a replacement for the usual pricing frictions, our theory produces monetary nonneutrality: when monetary policy loosens and inflation rises, customers misperceive markups as higher and feel unfairly treated; firms mitigate this perceived unfairness by reducing their markups; in general equilibrium, employment rises. The theory also features a hybrid short-run Phillips curve, realistic impulse responses of output and employment to monetary and technology shocks, and an upward-sloping long-run Phillips curve

Financial markets where traders neglect the informational content of prices

We present a model of a financial market where some traders are "cursed" when investing in a risky asset, failing to fully appreciate what prices convey about others' private information. Markets comprising cursed traders generate more trade than those comprising rationals; mixed markets can generate even more trade because rationals exploit return predictability caused by cursed. Per-trader volume in cursed markets increases with market size; volume may instead disappear when traders infer others' information from prices but dismiss it as noisier than their own. Public-information revelation raises rational and"dismissive" volume, but lowers cursed volume given moderate non-informational trading motives

The demand for bad policy when voters underappreciate equilibrium effects

Most of the political economy literature blames inefficient policies on institutions or politicians’ motives to supply bad policy, but voters may themselves be partially responsible by demanding bad policy. In this article, we posit that voters may systematically err when assessing potential changes in policy by underappreciating how new policies lead to new equilibrium behaviour. This biases voters towards policy changes that create direct benefits—welfare would rise if behaviour were held constant—even if those reforms ultimately reduce welfare because people adjust behaviour. Conversely, voters are biased against policies that impose direct costs even if they induce larger indirect benefits. Using a lab experiment, we find that a majority of subjects vote against policies that, while inflicting direct costs, would help them to overcome social dilemmas and thereby increase welfare. Subjects also support policies that, while producing direct benefits, create social dilemmas and ultimately hurt welfare. Both mistakes arise because subjects fail to fully anticipate the equilibrium effects of new policies. More precisely, we establish that subjects systematically underappreciate the extent to which policy changes will affect the behaviour of other people, and that these mistaken beliefs exert a causal effect on the demand for bad policy