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Choice spillovers across behavioral domains are important for market- ing, as they suggest that interventions in one choice domain may have far-reaching, and countervailing influences, in other domains. Using a novel dataset drawn from a university population, we study individual- level exercise behavior and food choices over the course of a year, and identify one such choice spillover. Specifically, we find that exercise per- formed before lunch is systematically correlated with a less healthy lunch choice: a behavior consistent with self-regulation failure. However, this effect is asymmetric, as a healthier lunch does not appear to have negative spillovers on exercise, instead increasing the probability of gym use later in the day. Survey evidence offers support of a self-licensing mechanism, while substantial timelags between gym use and meals cast doubt on a purely biological mechanism driving our results. We present a theoretical framework, based on reference-dependent preferences, which explain our main empirical findings.

We quantify the effect of pre-vote deliberation on the decisions of US appellate courts. We estimate a model of strategic voting with incomplete information in which judges communicate before casting their votes, and then compare the probability of mistakes in the court with deliberation with a counterfactual of no pre-vote communication. The model has multiple equilibria, and judges' preferences and information parameters are only partially identified. We find that there is a range of parameters in the identified set in which deliberation can be beneficial. Specifically, deliberation lowers the incidence of incorrect decisions when judges tend to disagree ex ante or their private information is relatively imprecise; otherwise, it tends to reduce the effectiveness of the court.

Using a sample of apartment transactions during 2004-2006 in Chengdu, China, we investigate the impact of superstitions in the Chinese real estate market. Numerology forms an important component of Chinese superstitious lore, with the numbers 8 and 6 signifying good luck, and the number 4 bad luck. We find that secondhand apartments located on floors ending with “8” fetch, on average, a 235 RMB higher price (per square meter) than on other floors. For newly constructed apartments, this price premium disappears due to uniform pricing of new housing units, but apartments on floors ending in an “8” are sold, on average, 6.9 days faster than on other floors. Buyers who have a phone number containing more “8”'s are more likely to purchase apartments in a floor ending with “8”; this suggests that at least part of the price premium for “lucky” apartments arises from the buyers' superstitious beliefs.

We estimate an equilibrium model of decision-making in the US Supreme Court which takes into account both private information and ideological differences between justices. We present a measure of the value of information in the court. Our measure is the probability that a justice votes differently that what she would have voted for in the absence of case specific information. We show that in roughly 44% of cases, justices' initial leanings - based on their priors and ideological biases - are changed by justices' personal assessments of the case. The results suggest a sizeable value of information. We evaluate the performance of the Court in different issues and time periods, and use counterfactual simulations to draw implications for institutional design.

In this paper, we address empirically the trade-offs involved in choosing between bureaucrats and politicians. In order to do this, we need to map institutions of selection and retention of public officials to the type of public officials they induce. We do this by specifying a collective decision-making model, and exploiting its equilibrium information to obtain estimates of the unobservable types. We focus on criminal decisions across US states' Supreme Courts. We find that justices that are shielded from voters' influence (“bureaucrats”) on average (i) have better information, (ii) are more likely to change their preconceived opinions about a case, and (iii) are more effective (make less mistakes) than their elected counterparts (”politicians”). We evaluate how performance would change if the courts replaced majority rule with unanimity rule.

We develop tests for common values at first-price sealed-bid auctions. Our tests are nonparametric, require observation only of the bids submitted at each auction, and are based on the fact that the "winner's curse" arises only in common values auctions. The tests build on recently developed methods for using observed bids to estimate each bidder's conditional expectation of the value of winning the auction. Equilibrium behavior implies that in a private values auction these expectations are invariant to the number of opponents each bidder faces, while with common values they are decreasing in the number of opponents. This distinction forms the basis of our tests. We consider both exogenous and endogenous variation in the number of bidders. Monte Carlo experiments show that our tests can perform well in samples of moderate sizes. We apply our tests to two different types of U.S. Forest Service timber auctions. For unit-price ("scaled") sales often argued to fit a private values model, our tests consistently fail to find evidence of common values. For "lumpsum" sales, where a priori arguments for common values appear stronger, our tests yield mixed evidence against the private values hypothesis.