empirical tests of information aggregation abstract this paper proposes tests to empirically examine whether auction prices aggregate information away from the limit these tests are applied to a unique data set containing winning bids and measures of the value and dispersion of information signals in ebay auctions for computers results suggest that prices partially aggregate information but do not converge to the common value even away from the limit more bidders and stronger information have a significant effect on the convergence of prices and information aggregation even partial information aggregation may represent a potential efficiency gain over one to one trade of used goods with uncertain common values

information aggregation in common value auctions a key question in information economics and finance is whether prices aggregate information in a competitive environment that is when agents are endowed with private information does competition lead in the limit to prices which would occur if all information were public this paper examines the asymptotic properties of prices in common value auctions when the number of bidders becomes large the main idea in this paper is to separate the issue of information aggregation from the issue of revenue efficiency we also distinguish between the amount of information prices contain and the degree to which prices approximate the asset s value using this approach we get a simple characterization of the limiting distribution of prices we are not only able to answer whether prices converge to the asset s value but also get an explicit form for the limiting distribution prices converge to the expected value of the asset conditional on the information possessed by what we call the pivotal bidder this provides insights on how the auction format and the information structure influence the limiting behavior of prices it shows that the limiting distribution of prices can be derived from the statistical properties of certain order statistics this lets us abstract from the specific equilibrium bidding strategies for example we show that while the first and second price auction have different equilibrium strategies they share a similar limiting distribution of prices these auctions yield different limiting distributions from auctions such as the english auction or kn auction our

job search and impatience workers who are more impatient search less intensively and set lower reservation wages the effect of impatience on exit rates from unemployment is therefore unclear if agents have exponential time preferences the reservation wage effect dominates for sufficiently patient individuals so increases in impatience lead to higher exit rates the opposite is true for agents with hyperbolic time preferences using two large longitudinal data sets we find that impatience measures are negatively correlated with search effort and the unemployment exit rate and are orthogonal to reservation wages impatience substantially affects outcomes in the direction predicted by the hyperbolic model

language group differences in time preferences evidence from primary school children in a bilingual city abstract we study differences in intertemporal choices across language groups in an incentivized experiment with 1154 children in a bilingual city the sample consists of 86 of all primary school kids in meran merano where about half of the 38 000 inhabitants speak german and the other half italian while both language groups live very close to each other we find that german speaking primary school children are about 16 percentage points more likely than italian speaking children to delay gratification in an intertemporal choice experiment the difference remains significant in several robustness checks and when controlling for a broad range of factors including risk attitudes iq family background or residential area hence we are able to show that language group affiliation which is often used as a proxy for culture plays an important role in shaping economic preferences already early in life

the loser s curse and information aggregation in common value auctions we consider an auction in which k identical objects of unknown value are auctioned off to n bidders the k highest bidders get an object and pay the k 1st bid bidders receive a signal that provides information about the value of the object we characterize the unique symmetric equilibrium of this auction we then consider a sequence of auctions a r with n r bidders and k r objects we show that price converges in probability to the true value of the object if and only if both k r and n r k r i e both the number of objects and the number of bidders who do not receive an object go to infinity

economic behavior of children and adolescents a first survey of experimental economics results abstract about 15 years ago economic experiments with children and adolescents were considered as an extravagant niche of economic research since then this type of research has exploded in scope and depth it has become clear that studying the development of economic behavior and its determinants is important to understand economic behavior of adults and to provide a basis for potential policy interventions with respect to economic behavior in childhood and adolescence given the huge increase of papers we provide the first overview of economic experiments with children and adolescents we focus on the following aspects rationality of choices risk preferences time preferences social preferences cooperation and competitiveness all of these aspects are analyzed with respect to the influence of age and gender and we also consider the role of socio economic status or interventions

are risk aversion and impatience related to cognitive ability is the way that people make risky choices or tradeoffs over time related to cognitive ability this paper investigates whether there is a link between cognitive ability risk aversion and impatience using a representative sample of the population and incentive compatible measures we conduct choice experiments measuring risk aversion and impatience over an annual time horizon for a randomly drawn sample of roughly 1 000 german adults subjects also take part in two different tests of cognitive ability which correspond to sub modules of one of the most widely used iq tests interviews are conducted in subjects own homes we find that lower cognitive ability is associated with greater risk aversion and more pronounced impatience these relationships are significant and robust to controlling for personal characteristics educational attainment income and measures of credit constraints we perform a series of additional robustness checks which help rule out other possible confounds

on the informational inefficiency of discriminatory price auctions we analyze bidding behavior in large discriminatory price auctions where the number of objects is a non trivial proportion of the number of bidders bidders observe private signals that are affiliated with the common value we show that the average price in the auction is biased downward from the expected value of the objects even in the competitive limit in particular we show that conditional on relatively low signals bidders bid the expected value of the objects conditional on their information and winning while bids at higher signals flatten out and are below the expected value conditional on winning

adolescent time preferences predict lifetime outcomes this study investigates the relationship between time preferences and lifetime social and economic outcomes we use a swedish longitudinal data set that links information from a large survey on children s time preferences at age 13 to administrative registers spanning over five decades our results indicate a substantial adverse relationship between high discount rates and school performance health labour supply and lifetime income males and high ability children gain significantly more from being future oriented these discrepancies are largest regarding outcomes later in life we also show that the relationship between time preferences and long run outcomes operates through early human capital investments

rational expectations information acquisition and competitive bidding most rational expectations market equilibrium models are not models of price formation and naive mechanisms leading to such equilibria can be severely manipulable in this paper a bidding model is developed which has the market like features that bidders act as price takers and that prices convey information higher equilibrium prices convey more favorable information about the quality of the objects being sold than do lower prices bidders can benefit from trading only if they have a transactions motive or if they have access to inside information apart from exceptional cases prices are not fully revealing a two stage model is developed in which bidders may acquire information at a cost before bidding and for which the equilibrium price is fully revealing resolving a well known paradox

an alternating recognition model of english auctions we present an alternative abstraction of an english oral ascending auction to the standard in milgrom and weber 1982 that accords more closely with practices in some auction markets in particular the assumptions that exits are irrevocable and necessarily public are dropped making endogenous the decision to compete silently and privately or openly in the model the price rises in a stylization of an auctioneer alternately recognizing two bidders who affirm willingness to pay the current price the auctioneer pays attention to other bidders only when a recognized bidder exits such exits may be temporary although we construct an equilibrium in which there is no benefit to exit and reentry the number of public exits is stochastic frequently a losing bidder will remain silent giving no indication of his willingness to pay and hence yielding no useful inference about his private information thus the source of the expected revenue advantage of english auctions over second price auctions is only stochastically available moreover when public exits are incomplete the ordinal rank of the bidder whose private information can be inferred is unknown making that information less valuable consequently the simpler formula for expected revenue in second price auctions may be the preferred approximation for english auctions

heterogeneous preferences and the individual change to alternative electricity contracts abstract based on data from a large scale computer based survey among more than 3700 citizens in germany this paper empirically disentangles the determinants of the general change of electricity contracts and the specific change from any green or non green to current green electricity contracts within the last ten years our econometric analysis reveals a strong relevance of behavioral factors and individual values and norms for example patience which was measured by an incentivized experiment included in the survey has a significantly positive effect on both general switches to alternative electricity contracts and specific switches to green electricity contracts furthermore trust and less robust social preferences also measured by an incentivized experiment have additional significantly positive effects on the specific change to green electricity contracts our estimation results also imply an important role of political identification i e an ecological policy orientation is strongly significantly positively correlated with the change to green electricity contracts furthermore several household specific factors like relocation decisions as well as socio demographic and socio economic variables like household income are also relevant the empirical analysis thus provides new explanation patterns for the phenomenon that relatively few households regularly change their electricity contracts and specifically switch to green electricity contracts although they have high stated preferences for such changes our insights suggest several directions for policy and electricity suppliers to increase these switching rates for example the high importance of trust for the change to green electricity contracts suggests transparency initiatives of electricity suppliers to decrease concerns against renewable energies

has the increased attachment of women to the labor market changed a family s ability to smooth income shocks an increase in a married woman s attachment to the labor market affected her family s ability to smooth unexpected income shocks between 1970 and 1990 the sharp rise in labor market attachment provided an increasingly important channel for smoothing shocks to spousal income as the participation rate stabilized this contribution to smoothing evened out in the great recession both spouses received negative income shocks and access to transfer income became the main insurance mechanism volatility of consumption followed volatility of family income trends but at a lower magnitude families ability to weather income shocks didn t change during the 1970 2010 period

life cycle variations in the association between current and lifetime income replication and extension for sweden we apply haider and solon s generalized errors in variables model to swedish income tax data to produce estimates of the association between current and lifetime income our estimates demonstrate strong life cycle patterns this implies that the widespread use of current income as a proxy for lifetime income leads to inconsistent parameter estimates i e life cycle bias even when the proxy is used as the dependent variable estimates for comparable cohorts of swedish and american men demonstrate surprising similarities there are however significant gender and cohort differences in this association that lead to statistically significant and quantitatively meaningful differences in life cycle biases

the today and tomorrow of kids time preferences and educational outcomes of children abstract we experimentally investigate the distribution of children s time preferences along gender and racial lines we find that boys are more impatient than girls and black children are more impatient than white children black boys have the highest discount rates of all groups most importantly we show that impatience has a direct correlation with behavior that is predictive of economic success an increase of one standard deviation in the discount rate is associated with an increase in the number of disciplinary referrals that a child has the following school year by 14 our results suggest that impatience might play an important role in determining the success of performance incentive programs for school children

patience among children abstract recent policy initiatives offer cash payments to children and often their families to induce better health and educational choices these policies implicitly assume that children are especially impatient i e have high discount rates however little is known about the nature of children s patience how it varies across children and whether children can even make rational inter temporal choices this paper examines the inter temporal choices of 5 to 16 year old children in an artefactual field experiment we examine their choices between varying levels of compensation received in 2 or 4 months in the future and in 0 or 2 months in the future we find that children s choices are consistent with hyperbolic discounting boys are less patient than girls older children are more patient and that mathematical achievement test scores private schooling and parent s patience are not correlated with children s patience we also find that although more than 25 of children do not make rational inter temporal choices within a single two period time frame we cannot find variables that explain this behavior other than age and standardized mathematical achievement test scores

cost benefit analyses versus referenda we consider a planner who chooses between two public policies and ask whether a referendum or a cost benefit analysis leads to higher welfare we find that a referendum leads to higher welfare than a cost benefit analysis in a common value environment cost benefit analysis is better in a private value environment

optimal paternalistic health and human capital subsidy abstract we characterize the first best earnings subsidy when agents are heterogeneous with respect to present biased preferences and cognitive skills when agents health and human capital biased allocations affect not only welfare but also their labor earnings a single subsidy corrects for agents mistaken decisions we highlight two novel features of paternalistic interventions the effects of agents decisions on the economy s supply side through future productivity and the role of cognitive skills on individual s optimal trade off between human capital accumulation and leisure we compare this optimal subsidy to an alternative policy package

rates of information aggregation in common value auctions we study the rates at which transaction prices aggregate information in common value auctions under the different information structures in wilson rev econ stud 44 1977 511 and pesendorfer and swinkels econometrica 65 1997 1247 we consider uniform price auctions in which k identical objects of unknown value are auctioned to n bidders where both n and k are allowed to diverge to infinity and k n converges to a number in 0 1 the wilson assumptions lead to information aggregation at a rate proportional to n k but the price aggregates information at a rate proportional to n k in the ps setting we also consider english auctions and investigate whether the extra information revealed in equilibrium improves convergence rates in these auctions

optimal defaults and active decisions defaults often have a large influence on consumer decisions we identify an overlooked but practical alternative to defaults requiring individuals to make an explicit choice for themselves we study such active decisions in the context of 401 k saving we find that compelling new hires to make active decisions about 401 k enrollment raises the initial fraction that enroll by 28 percentage points relative to a standard opt in enrollment procedure producing a savings distribution three months after hire that would take 30 months to achieve under standard enrollment we also present a model of 401 k enrollment and derive conditions under which the optimal enrollment regime is automatic enrollment i e default enrollment standard enrollment i e default non enrollment or active decisions i e no default and compulsory choice active decisions are optimal when consumers have a strong propensity to procrastinate and savings preferences are highly heterogeneous financial illiteracy however favors default enrollment over active decision enrollment

patience self control and the demand for commitment evidence from a large scale field experiment patience and self control are important non cognitive skills that are associated with favorable educational economic and social outcomes this paper provides empirical evidence to inform discussions on possible educational interventions to make children more forward looking or less present biased by putting forward a way to identify self control problems in children and exploring the role of commitment devices in mitigating such problems we report results from an experiment that measures planned allocations the demand for a commitment device and actual choices in the context of chocolate consumption over two days the experiment is conducted as part of a large field study on children s preferences which allows us to correlate behavior with variables related to the subjects socio economic background and educational environment as well as preference parameters elicited through other tasks and surveys we find a large demand for commitment among children in addition we identify important correlations between patience commitment demand and time inconsistency as well as student specific personality traits and outcomes such as school success