Costly knowledge

Costly gaps in physicians' drug knowledge.

Costly Expertise

In many environments, expertise is costly. Costs can manifest themselves in numerous ways, ranging from the time that is required for a financial consultant to study companies’ performances, to the resources necessary for academic referees to produce knowledgeable reports, to the attention and thought needed for jurors to construct informed convictions. The current paper asks a natural question...

Costly Contemplation∗

We study preferences over opportunity sets. Such preferences are monotone if every opportunity set is at least as good as its subsets. We prove a representation theorem for monotone preferences. The representation suggests that the decision maker optimally contemplates his mood before making his ultimate choice from his opportunity set. We show that our model reduces to that of Kreps (1979) whe...

Costly Persuasion

In many settings of economic interest, information is ex ante symmetric, but one agent designs the informational environment—i.e., controls what additional information will be generated. A number of recent papers study such situations, with applications including Internet advertising (Rayo and Segal 2010), communication in organizations (Jehiel 2013), bank regulation (Gick and Pausch 2012; Gold...

Costly Democracy

The evidence for successful postwar democratic transitions is not encouraging: since 1989, the international community has launched 19 major peacebuilding operations. These operations were reasonably successful in securing peace, but much less successful in establishing a democratic regime. Five years after the operations began, only two countries qualified as liberal democracy; also, no recent...