Title : How do you know you won’t like it if you’ve never triedit? Preference discovery and strategic bundling

Abstract : Consumers discover their preferences through experience, yet the sequence and composition of those experiences are often designed—by platforms, algorithms, or policymakers.Adopting a “data-design” approach to preference discovery, we study how the structureof consumption data affect learning. When experiences are bundled, the co-occurrence ofgoods creates a network of correlation externalities that shapes how consumption surprisepropagates across products. Using tools from OLS estimation and spectral analysis, wecharacterize the conditions that favor learning and preference discovery and those thatsustain bias. The framework introduces a new way to think about learning from designeddata, providing a foundation for new theoretical and applied work on preference discoveryand belief manipulation. A toy empirical example from the movie industry illustrates themodel’s key mechanisms.

Title : Working time reductions and monopsonypower

Abstract : I use newly digitized micro datasets to evaluate one of the first-ever labor regulations in Belgium: a maximum 9-hour workday in coal mines in 1910. On average, hourly wages and employment increased. However, these effects were sizedependent: hourly wages decreased in small firms, while all employment gainswere concentrated in large firms. I argue that these results are inconsistent withthree common assumptions: (i) workers choose hours, (ii) competitive wages, and(iii) a Cobb-Douglas technology in jobs and hours. I rationalize these results in adirected search model where firms with heterogeneous TFP post vacancies, hours,and wages while internalizing workers’ leisure preferences. Monopsony power leadsto long hours. When hours are capped, a firm either increases wages to substitutelost hours with new hires, or cuts wages to restore markdowns. Which mechanismdominates depends on firm size, even holding monopsony power constant. Welfareanalysis with sufficient statistics suggests that the 1910 reform improved workers’welfare.

Title : Transparency and competition for influence

Abstract : We study the impact of mandatory disclosure of contributions paid by interestedthird parties to decision makers such as doctors, politicians, or financial advisors. Whiletransparency is commonly viewed as a means of reducing potential conflicts of interest, our analysis reveals less benign outcomes when multiple third parties attempt toinfluence decision makers in opposing directions. We argue specifically that in thiscase transparency enables competing third parties to establish separate spheres of influence, where their ascendancy is not attenuated by the opposing efforts by rivals.Consequently, decision makers’ choices become more polarized. We apply this theoryto the market for anticoagulants, using data on prescriptions and payments made bypharmaceutical companies to doctors in the United States before and after the Physician Sunshine Act of 2010 that mandated payment disclosure. The empirical analysissupports our theory