Social preferences facilitate the internalization of health externalities, for example, by reducing mobility during a pandemic. We test this hypothesis using data from 258 cities worldwide alongside experimentally validated measures social preferences. Controlling time-varying heterogeneity that could arise at level which mitigation policies are implemented, we find they matter less in regions ...

We propose and estimate a dynamic model of voting which incorporates the three main factors affecting voting choices of individual citizens: party identification, policy preferences and candidates’ valence. Using individual level data on voting decisions in two consecutive presidential elections we identify and estimate (1) the distribution of voters’ policy positions, and (2) candidates’ valen...

We study the formation of advocacy groups and how they can impact policy outcomes by revealing information about voters’ preferences to uninformed political candidates. We conduct a laboratory experiment based on a two-candidate spatial electoral competition setting where the policy preferences of voters are (initially) unknown and change over time. In the control treatment candidates learn abo...

We consider a retailer with limited inventories of identically priced, substitutable products. Customers arrive sequentially and the firm decides which subset of products to offer to each arriving customer depending on the customer’s preferences, the inventory levels, and the remaining time in the season. We show that the optimal assortment policy is to offer all available products if the custo...

The aim of this paper is to uncover the aggregate monetary policy preferences in the Euro Area. This is pursued under the assumption of optimising policy behaviour subject to a simple model of the macroeconomic structure, following a procedure recently proposed in the literature, in which GMM estimation stems from the optimal control solution to the optimisation problem. Instead of waiting for ...

We propose a generalization of the model of electoral competition between two candidates who differ in non-policy characteristics that allows voters to have heterogeneous and private valuations of these characteristics. Unlike models in which voters’valuations of such non-policy characteristics are common and common knowledge and which never admit pure strategy equilibria, in our setup we show ...

BACKGROUND Health policy-making, a complex, multi-factorial process, requires balancing conflicting values. A salient issue is public support for policies; however, one reason for limited impact of public opinion may be misperceptions of policy makers regarding public opinion. For example, empirical research is scarce on perceptions of policy makers regarding public opinion on smoke-free public...