The Model Selection Curse

A "statistician" takes an action on behalf of an agent, based on the agent's self-reported personal data and a sample involving other people. The action that he takes is an estimated function of the agent's report. The estimation procedure involves model selection. We ask the following question: Is truth-telling optimal for the agent given the statistician's procedure? We analyze this question in the context of a simple example that highlights the role of model selection. We suggest that our simple exercise may have implications for the broader issue of human interaction with "machine learning" algorithms

Sending Information to Interactive Receivers Playing a Generalized Prisoners Dilemma

Consider the problem of information disclosure for a planner who faces two agents interacting in a state-dependent multi-action prisoners?dilemma. We ?nd conditions under which the planner can make use of his superior information by disclosing some of it to the agents, and conditions under which such information leakage is not possible. Although the problem is entirely symmetric, the planner?s only way to reveal part of the information is based on creating asymmetries between the two agents by giving them di¤erent pieces of information. We also ? nd conditions under which such partially informative equilibria are the planner?s best equilibria.Information Disclosure; Generalized Prisoners Dilemma; Uninformative Equilibria; Partially or Fully Informative Equilibria

Consideration Sets and Competitive Marketing

We study a market model in which competing firms use costly marketing devices to influence the set of alternatives which consumers perceive as relevant. Consumers in our model are boundedly rational in the sense that they have an imperfect perception of what is relevant to their decision problem. They apply well-defined preferences to a "consideration set", which is a function of the marketing devices employed by the firms. We examine the implications of this behavioral model in the context of a competitive market model, particularly on industry profits, vertical product differentiation, the use of marketing devices and consumers' conversion rates.consideration sets, marketing, industrial organization, advertising, default bias, inertia, product display, bounded rationality, limited attention, persuasion

On the strategic use of attention grabbers

When a firm decides which products to offer or put on display, it takes into account the products' ability to attract attention to the brand name as a whole. Thus, the value of a product to the firm emanates from the consumer demand it directly meets, as well as the indirect demand it generates for the firms' other products. We explore this idea in the context of a stylzed model of competition between media content providers (broadcast TV channels, internet portals, newspapers) over consumers with limited attention. We characterize the equilibrium use of products as attention grabbers and its implications for consumer conversion, industry profits and (mostly vertical) product differentiation.Bounded rationality, irrelevant alternatives, limited attention, consideration sets, preferences over menus, marketing, persuasion, conversion rates, media platforms

Consumer optimism and price discrimination

We study monopolistic design of a menu of non-linear tariffs when consumers have biased prior beliefs regarding their future preferences. In our model, consumers are "optimistic'' if their prior belief assigns too much weight to states of nature characterized by large gains from trade. A consumer's degree of optimism is his private information, and the monopolist employs the menu of non-linear tariffs to screen it. We characterize the optimal menu and show that the existence of non-common priors has significant qualitative implications for price discrimination and ex-post inefficiency. Finally, the characterization enables us to interpret aspects of real-life menus of non-linear tariffs.contracts, speculative trade, screening, non-common priors, mechanism-design, optimism, three-part tariffs

Reason-based choice: a bargaining rationale for the attraction and compromise effects

Among the most important and robust violations of rationality are the attraction and the compromise effects. The compromise effect refers to the tendency of individuals to choose an intermediate option in a choice set, while the attraction effect refers to the tendency to choose an option that dominates some other options in the choice set. This paper argues that both effects may result from an individual's attempt to overcome the difficulty of making a choice in the absence of a single criterion for ranking the options. Moreover, we propose to view the resolution of this choice problem as a cooperative solution to an intra-personal bargaining problem among different selves of an individual, where each self represents a different criterion for choosing. We first identify a set of properties that characterize those choice correspondences that coincide with our bargaining solution, for some pair of preference relations. Second, we provide a revealed-preference foundation to our bargaining solution and characterize the extent to which these two preference relations can be uniquely identified. Alternatively, our analysis may be reinterpreted as a study of (inter-personal) bilateral bargaining over a finite set of options. In that case, our results provide a new characterization, as well as testable implications, of an ordinal bargaining solution that has been previously discussed in the literature under the various names of fallback bargaining, unanimity compromise, Rawlsian arbitration rule and Kant-Rawls social compromise.Behavioral economics, attraction and compromise effects, bargaining

Group Decision-Making in the Shadow of Disagreement

A model of group decision-making is studied, in which one of two alternatives must be chosen. While group members differ in their valuations of the alternatives, everybody prefers some alternative to disagreement. Our model is distinguished by three features: private information regarding valuations, varying intensities in the preference for one out-come over the other, and the option to declare neutrality in order to avoid disagreement. We uncover a variant on the “tyranny of the majority": there is always an equilibrium in which the majority is more aggressive in pushing its alternative, thus enforcing their will via both numbers and voice. However, under very general conditions an aggressive minority equilibrium inevitably makes an appearance, provided that the group is large enough. This equilibrium displays a “tyranny of the minority": it is always true that the increased aggression of the minority more than compensates for smaller number, leading to the minority outcome being implemented with larger probability than the majority alternative. In all cases the option to remain neutral ensures that the probability of disagreement is bounded away from one (as group size changes), regardless of the supermajority value needed for agreement, as long as it is not unanimity.Collective decision-making, Groups, Disagreements, Decision rules