Court decisions in the past twenty years such as Southern Burlington County NAACP v. Mount Laurel Associated, as well as recent legislation, have made exclusionary zoning laws based on race illegal and have limited, at least in many states, the legality of exclusionary zoning based on income....

Over the past several years, environmental economists have been increasingly attracted to the use of information as an alternative to traditional methods for regulating externalities. An example of this approach is "eco-labeling," where a third party certifies firms' products; this approach is...

Regulators and the firms they regulate interact repeatedly. Over the course of these interactions, the regulator collects data that contains information about the firm's id- iosyncratic private characteristics. This paper studies the case in which the regulator uses information gleaned from past...

We analyze a canonical binary-action coordination game under the global games framework. To reduce coordination failure, we propose a novel intervention program that screens agents based on their heterogeneous interim beliefs. Compared with conventional government-guarantee type of programs, it...

Markets are often viewed as a tool for aggregating disparate private knowledge, a stance supported by past laboratory experiments. However, traders' acquisition cost of information has typically been ignored. Results from a laboratory experiment involving six treatments varying the cost of...

We show that on-demand insurance contracts, an innovative form of coverage recently introduced through the InsurTech sector, can serve as a screening device. To this end, we develop a new adverse selection model consistent with Wilson (1977), Miyazaki (1977) and Spence (1978). Consumers have...

This paper introduces two simple betting mechanisms, Top-Flop and Threshold betting, to elicit unverifiable information from crowds. Agents are offered bets on the rating of an item about which they received a private signal versus that of a random item. We characterize conditions for the chosen...

Group decision making is commonly used in juries, businesses, and in politics to increase the informational basis for a decision and to improve decision accuracy. Recent work on generalizing Condercet's jury theorem provides a compelling justification for using groups in this manner. But these...