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On Local Overidentification And Efficiency Gains In Modern Causal Inference And Data Combination, Xiaohong Chen, Haitian Xie Mar 2026

On Local Overidentification And Efficiency Gains In Modern Causal Inference And Data Combination, Xiaohong Chen, Haitian Xie

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper studies nonparametric local (over-)identification and the semiparametric efficiency in modern causal frameworks. We develop a unified approach that begins by translating structural models with latent variables into their induced statistical models of observables and then analyzes local overidentification through conditional moment restrictions. We apply this approach to three popular classes of causal models: (1) the general treatment model under unconfoundedness; (2) the negative control model, and (3) the long-term causal inference model under unobserved confounding. The first model yields a locally just-identified statistical model, implying that all regular asymptotically linear estimators of the treatment effect have the same …

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Triple/Double-Debiased Lasso, Denis Chetverikov, Joseph R.V. Sørensen, Aleh Tsyvinski Mar 2026

Triple/Double-Debiased Lasso, Denis Chetverikov, Joseph R.V. Sørensen, Aleh Tsyvinski

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

In this paper, we propose a triple (or double-debiased) Lasso estimator for inference on a low-dimensional parameter in high-dimensional linear regression models. The estimator is based on a moment function that satisfies not only first- but also second-order Neyman orthogonality conditions, thereby eliminating both the leading bias and the second-order bias induced by regularization. We derive an asymptotic linear representation for the proposed estimator and show that its remainder terms are never larger and are often smaller in order than those in the corresponding asymptotic linear representation for the standard double Lasso estimator. Because of this improvement, the triple Lasso …

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First Proof Solutions And Comments, Mohammed Abouzaid, Andrew J. Blumberg, Martin Hairer, Joe Kileel, Tamara G. Kolda, Paul D. Nelson, Daniel Spielman, Nikhil Srivastava, Rachel Ward, Shmuel Weinberger, Lauren Williams Mar 2026

First Proof Solutions And Comments, Mohammed Abouzaid, Andrew J. Blumberg, Martin Hairer, Joe Kileel, Tamara G. Kolda, Paul D. Nelson, Daniel Spielman, Nikhil Srivastava, Rachel Ward, Shmuel Weinberger, Lauren Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Here we provide our solutions to the First Proof questions. We also discuss the best responses from publicly available AI systems that we were able to obtain in our experiments prior to the release of the problems on February 5, 2025. We hope this discussion will help readers with the relevant domain expertise to assess such responses.

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Stochastic Optimization And Coupling, Frank Yang, Kai Hao Yang Mar 2026

Stochastic Optimization And Coupling, Frank Yang, Kai Hao Yang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We study optimization problems in which a linear functional is maximized over probability measures that are dominated by a given measure according to an integral stochastic order in an arbitrary dimension. We show that the following four properties are equivalent for any such order: (i) the test function cone is closed under pointwise minimum, (ii) the value function is affine, (iii) the solution correspondence has a convex graph with decomposable extreme points, and (iv) every ordered pair of measures admits an order-preserving coupling. As corollaries, we derive the extreme and exposed point properties involving integral stochastic orders such as multidimensional …

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Appendix To “Black Swans And Financial Stability: A Framework For Building Resilience”, Daniel J. Barth, Stacey L. Schreft Mar 2026

Appendix To “Black Swans And Financial Stability: A Framework For Building Resilience”, Daniel J. Barth, Stacey L. Schreft

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No abstract provided.

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The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Rohini Pande Mar 2026

The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi K. Goldberg, Rohini Pande

Discussion Papers

Since the late 1980s, extreme poverty has declined sharply, life expectancy and schooling have increased, and electoral democracy has expanded. However poverty reduction has slowed in recent years, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, amid intensifying conflict, fragility, climate risks, democratic backsliding, and the erosion of global trends—including trade integration and geopolitical stability—that once supported growth. These dynamics raise three interrelated questions: what barriers impede further progress; where will future growth in lower-income countries come from; and how can growth be broadly shared. Taking stock of 15 chapters forthcoming in Volume 6 of the Handbook of Development Economics, we discuss how …

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The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi Goldberg, Rohini Pande Mar 2026

The Changing Landscape Of International Development: An Introduction, Pascaline Dupas, Pinelopi Goldberg, Rohini Pande

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Since the late 1980s, extreme poverty has declined sharply, life expectancy and schooling have increased, and electoral democracy has expanded. However poverty reduction has slowed in recent years, particularly following the COVID-19 pandemic, amid intensifying conflict, fragility, climate risks, democratic backsliding, and the erosion of global trends—including trade integration and geopolitical stability—that once supported growth. These dynamics raise three interrelated questions: what barriers impede further progress; where will future growth in lower-income countries come from; and how can growth be broadly shared. Taking stock of 15 chapters forthcoming in Volume 6 of the Handbook of Development Economics, we discuss how …

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Menu Pricing Of Large Language Models, Dirk Bergemann Mar 2026

Menu Pricing Of Large Language Models, Dirk Bergemann

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We develop a framework for the optimal pricing and product design of LLMs in which a provider sells menus of token budgets to users who differ in their valuations across a continuum of tasks. Under a homogeneous production technology, we show that users’ high-dimensional type profiles are summarized by a scalar index, reducing the seller’s problem to one-dimensional screening. The optimal mechanism takes the form of committed-spend contracts: buyers pay for a budget that they allocate across token classes priced at marginal cost. We extend the analysis to environments with multiple differentiated models and to competition between a proprietary leader …

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Thin Sets Are Not Equally Thin: Minimax Learning Of Submanifold Integrals, Xiaohong Chen, Wayne Yuan Gao Mar 2026

Thin Sets Are Not Equally Thin: Minimax Learning Of Submanifold Integrals, Xiaohong Chen, Wayne Yuan Gao

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Many economic parameters are identified by “thin sets” (submanifolds with Lebesgue measure zero) and hence difficult to recover from data in an ambient space. This paper provides a unified theory for estimation and inference of such “thin-set” identified functionals. We show that thin sets are not equally thin: their intrinsic dimensionality m matters in a precise manner. For a nonparametric regression h0 with Hölder smoothness s and d-dimensional covariates in the ambient space, we show that n^{-s/(2s+d−m)} is the minimax optimal rate of estimating linear and nonlinear (e.g., quadratic, upper contour) integrals of h0 on an m-dimensional submanifold (0 ≤ …

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Screening And Segmenting: A Consumer Surplus Perspective, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Michael C. Wang Mar 2026

Screening And Segmenting: A Consumer Surplus Perspective, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Michael C. Wang

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We analyze consumer surplus when a monopolist can adjust both prices and prod-uct qualities across segments, engaging in second- and third-degree price discrimination simultaneously. We characterize the consumer-optimal segmentation and show that it has a striking structure: consumers with the same value receive the same quality in every segment, though prices differ. Under mild conditions, any segmentation harms consumers if and only if demand is sufficiently more elastic than supply. Hence, po-tential benefits for consumers depend critically on demand and supply elasticities. These findings have implications for regulatory policy regarding price discrimination and market segmentation.

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Identifying Common Trend Determinants In Panel Data, Yoonseok Lee, Peter C.B. Phillips, Suyong Song, Donggyu Sul Mar 2026

Identifying Common Trend Determinants In Panel Data, Yoonseok Lee, Peter C.B. Phillips, Suyong Song, Donggyu Sul

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper develops a novel method for identifying observable determinants of latent common trends in nonstationary panel data, which are typically removed or controlled in two-way fixed effects regressions. By examining cross sectional dispersion processes, we assess whether panel series exhibit distributional convergence toward specific observed time series, revealing them as long run determinants of the underlying latent trend. The approach also offers a new perspective on cointegration between time series and panel data, focusing on the relative variation of the panel data with respect to the cointegration error. Applying this method to U.S. state-level crime rates demonstrates that the …

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The Skill Premium In Times Of Rapid Technological Change, Tarek Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Pascual Restrepo Mar 2026

The Skill Premium In Times Of Rapid Technological Change, Tarek Hassan, Aakash Kalyani, Pascual Restrepo

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

No abstract provided.

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Trade, Labor Market Concentration, And Wages, Mayara Felix Mar 2026

Trade, Labor Market Concentration, And Wages, Mayara Felix

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

I estimate the effect of trade on local labor market concentration and its implications for wages using employer-employee linked data and tariff shocks from Brazil’s trade liberalization. Trade increased concentration by 7%, an effect driven by firm exit and worker flows to surviving import-competing firms. Increased concentration reduced wage take-home shares—estimated at 50 cents on the dollar pre-shock—enough to offset small wage gains from reallocation, but did not meaningfully reduce wages on net. Most of the wage declines attributed to Brazil’s trade liberalization resulted instead from reductions in the marginal revenue product of labor. Incorporating informality reveals substantial regional heterogeneity.

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Subjective Earnings And Employment Dynamics, Manual Arellano, Orazio Attanasio, Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi, Gonzalo Paz-Pardo Mar 2026

Subjective Earnings And Employment Dynamics, Manual Arellano, Orazio Attanasio, Margherita Borella, Mariacristina De Nardi, Gonzalo Paz-Pardo

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We develop a new approach to estimating earnings, job, and employment dynamics using subjective expectations data from the NY Fed Survey of Consumer Expectations. These data provide beliefs about future earnings offers and acceptance probabilities, offering direct information on counterfactual outcomes and enabling identification under weaker assumptions. Our framework avoids biases from selection and unobserved heterogeneity that affect models using realized outcomes. First-step fixed-effects regressions identify risk, persistence, and transition effects; second-step GMM recovers the covariance structure of unobserved heterogeneities such as ability, mobility, and match quality. We find lower risk and persistence of the individual productivity component than in …

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The Geometry Of Learning Under Ai Delegation, Lingxiao Huang, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi Mar 2026

The Geometry Of Learning Under Ai Delegation, Lingxiao Huang, Nisheeth K. Vishnoi

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

As AI systems shift from tools to collaborators, a central question is how the skills of humans relying on them change over time. We study this question mathematically by modeling the joint evolution of human skill and AI delegation as a coupled dynamical system. In our model, delegation adapts to relative performance, while skill improves through use and decays under non-use; crucially, both updates arise from optimizing a single performance metric measuring expected task error. Despite this local alignment, adaptive AI use fundamentally alters the global stability structure of human skill acquisition. Beyond the high-skill equilibrium of human-only learning, the …

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Archives And Children's Knowledge, Elliott Kuecker, Ashley Rockenbach Feb 2026

Archives And Children's Knowledge, Elliott Kuecker, Ashley Rockenbach

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This article argues for the importance of collecting works created by children—not just about and not just for—in formal archival collections. Framed through the ideas of legitimate knowledge and epistemic injustice, this piece combines notions important to children’s rights activists and childhood studies scholars with the role archives can play in preserving children’s knowledge through child-created materials. The authors describe how researchers struggle to find work created by children within archives, impacting the ability to create child-centered research that centers children’s views of the world as prominently as adult views of the world. Some collections that do include child-created materials …

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Accepting And Implementing Virtual Reality In Archives: Archivists' Perspective, Farzaneh Talebhaghighi Feb 2026

Accepting And Implementing Virtual Reality In Archives: Archivists' Perspective, Farzaneh Talebhaghighi

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Virtual reality (VR) has emerged as a transformative technology across various domains, including education, entertainment, and cultural heritage institutions. While libraries and museums have actively explored VR’s potential to enhance user engagement and accessibility, its adoption in archival settings remains limited. This study examines the perspectives of academic archivists regarding the acceptance and implementation of VR in archives, identifying key factors that influence their willingness to adopt or reject the technology. Through qualitative interviews with five archivists from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University, this research explores the perceived benefits, challenges, and institutional barriers associated with VR integration. …

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An Archival Responsibility: A Scoping Review Of Literature Regarding The Documentary Burdens Of Refugees, Ana Roeschley, Kinza Alizai, Crystal Tharayil, Amy Lanier, Merrion D. Frederick, Homero R. Cuevas Feb 2026

An Archival Responsibility: A Scoping Review Of Literature Regarding The Documentary Burdens Of Refugees, Ana Roeschley, Kinza Alizai, Crystal Tharayil, Amy Lanier, Merrion D. Frederick, Homero R. Cuevas

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Documented individuals who do not live in conflict zones can usually access and use their records to migrate, begin new careers, enroll their children in educational institutions, and gain access to healthcare through mostly routine record-related procedures. However, these standard processes become impossible obstacles for refugees when they lose access to their personal records as part of their forced displacement. Though ever-present for refugees, these documentary burdens are compounded in times of societal crises and political upheaval—times when documentation is most critical. If archivists and archival scholars are to address these issues, it is important to understand the scope of …

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Leveraging Consumer-Level Ai For Descriptive Metadata Creation In Archival Collections, Hope Dunbar, Ken Axford Feb 2026

Leveraging Consumer-Level Ai For Descriptive Metadata Creation In Archival Collections, Hope Dunbar, Ken Axford

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

This study evaluates the effectiveness of consumer-level AI tools—ChatGPT Pro and Microsoft Copilot—for generating descriptive metadata in digital archival collections. Using a pilot project at the University at Buffalo's University Archives, researchers tested these tools on transcripts from the WBFO radio archives to create program descriptions of varying lengths. Findings demonstrate that both tools significantly reduced processing time for audio collections, with each exhibiting distinct advantages: ChatGPT Pro offered more adaptable outputs while Microsoft Copilot excelled in structured environments with superior privacy protections. The study explores prompt engineering strategies, examines limitations including AI hallucinations when identifying subject headings, and addresses …

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Review Of Ethics In Linked Data, Rebecca Fried Feb 2026

Review Of Ethics In Linked Data, Rebecca Fried

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

"Ethics in Linked Data," edited by B. M. Watson, Alexandra Provo, and Kathleen Burlingame, offers a critical examination of the ethical challenges and opportunities in linked data practices within GLAM institutions. In its sixteen chapters the anthology blends theoretical frameworks with practical case studies to address the social and cultural implications of linked data systems. Divided into three parts, the book explores the theoretical and contextual foundations of ethical considerations, addresses institutional and structural challenges shaped by colonial and hegemonic forces, and focuses on community-centered projects that amplify marginalized voices. By highlighting issues such as sustainability, inclusivity, and privacy, the …

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Review Of Land In Libraries: Toward A Materialist Conception Of Education, Anna Z. Szapiro Feb 2026

Review Of Land In Libraries: Toward A Materialist Conception Of Education, Anna Z. Szapiro

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

Extractive practices of colonial land theft and environmental exploitation have produced intolerable global conditions leading to climate collapse. As the information field grapples with its culpability in colonial violence and climate change, Lydia Zvyagintseva and Mary Greenshields’s incisive Land in Libraries: Toward a Materialist Conception of Education draws contributions from practitioners in the United States and Canada to chart a way forward. Through historical analysis, case studies, critical theory, and autoethnography, authors in this volume take up land – and our relation to it – as the epistemological catalyst for systemic change. At once austere critique and lyrical contemplation, Land …

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Review Of Scattered And Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives And Remade History, Kai H. Uchida Feb 2026

Review Of Scattered And Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives And Remade History, Kai H. Uchida

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

In Scattered and Fugitive Things: How Black Collectors Created Archives and Remade History, historian and archivist Laura E. Helton tells the story of six individuals – Arturo Schomburg, Alexander Gumby, Virginia Lee, Dorothy Porter, Vivian Harsh, and Lawrence Reddick – whose practices of radical collecting revalued and recast the importance of Black history. Helton combines innovative methodological readings of previously undervalued archival sources with a keen understanding of archival practice to illuminate Black archives as a site of radical collecting, intellectual inquiry, and community empowerment. Compellingly written with insights about the theory of their curation and the story of …

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Pricing And Production Without The Invisible Hand, Joel P. Flynn, George Nikolakoudis, Karthik A. Sastry Feb 2026

Pricing And Production Without The Invisible Hand, Joel P. Flynn, George Nikolakoudis, Karthik A. Sastry

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Modern theories of the business cycle do not allow for the simultaneous rational choice of both prices and quantities, instead assuming that an “invisible hand” determines one of these variables to clear markets. In this paper, we develop a macroeconomic framework in which both prices and quantities are chosen directly by firms, and exchange is both voluntary and efficient. Because of uncertainty about demand and productivity, individual product markets can be in excess supply or rationed. The absence of market-clearing changes pricing and production in qualitatively important ways: markups are no longer determined solely by the elasticity of demand, and …

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Digital Ecosystems And Data Regulation, Andrew Rhodes, Jidong Zhou, Junjie Zhou Feb 2026

Digital Ecosystems And Data Regulation, Andrew Rhodes, Jidong Zhou, Junjie Zhou

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper develops a framework in which a multiproduct ecosystem competes with multiple single-product firms in both price and innovation. The ecosystem can use data from one product to improve the quality of its other products. We use the framework to study three regulatory policies aimed at leveling the playing field. Restricting the ecosystem’s cross-product data usage, or forcing it to share data with single-product firms, benefits those firms and induces them to innovate more. However, these policies also dampen the ecosystem’s incentive to collect data and innovate, potentially raising prices. Consumers are better off only when single-product firms are …

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Initial-Condition-Robust Inference In Autoregressive Models, Donald W. K. Andrews, Ming Li, Yapeng Zheng Feb 2026

Initial-Condition-Robust Inference In Autoregressive Models, Donald W. K. Andrews, Ming Li, Yapeng Zheng

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This paper considers confidence intervals (CIs) for the autoregressive (AR) parameter in an AR model with an AR parameter that may be close or equal to one. Existing CIs rely on the assumption of a stationary or fixed initial condition to obtain correct asymptotic coverage and good finite sample coverage. When this assumption fails, their coverage can be quite poor. In this paper, we introduce a new CI for the AR parameter whose coverage probability is completely robust to the initial condition, both asymptotically and in finite samples. This CI pays only a small price in terms of its length …

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Willingness To Travel With Endogenous Distance: Evidence From The Changing Retail Landscape, Yue Cao, Judith Chevalier, Jessie Handbury, Hayden Parsley, Kevin Williams Feb 2026

Willingness To Travel With Endogenous Distance: Evidence From The Changing Retail Landscape, Yue Cao, Judith Chevalier, Jessie Handbury, Hayden Parsley, Kevin Williams

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Economists often use variation in consumers’ distance from services as a source of demand variation. This approach typically treats consumer-supplier distance as exogenous, despite suppliers strategically choosing locations. We develop a novel class of instruments to address this endogeneity. These instruments exploit the spatial distribution of consumer demographics and can be constructed from standard cross-sectional data, making them useful in a variety of spatial applications. Our preferred instruments use the income composition of concentric discs centered on the Central Business District. Applying these instruments to smartphone geolocation data for millions of devices across 18 metropolitan areas, we estimate consumer preferences …

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Affective Interdependence And Welfare, Aviad Heifetz, Enrico Minelli, Heracles M. Polemarchakis Jan 2026

Affective Interdependence And Welfare, Aviad Heifetz, Enrico Minelli, Heracles M. Polemarchakis

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Purely affective interaction allows the welfare of an individual to depend only the individual’s own action and on the profile of welfare levels of others. Under an assumption on the structure of mutual affection that we interpret as non-reinforcing mutual affection, we show that equilibria of affective interaction are Pareto optimal. Moreover, if purely affective interaction induces a standard game, then an equilibrium profile of actions is a Nash equilibrium of the induced game, and this Nash equilibrium and Pareto optimal profile of strategies is locally dominant.

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Human Capital And Development, Philippe Aghion, Ingvild Almås, Costas Meghir Jan 2026

Human Capital And Development, Philippe Aghion, Ingvild Almås, Costas Meghir

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

Human capital is central to efforts to promote growth, convergence, and the elimination of poverty. Drawing on seminal macroeconomic frameworks by Nelson-Phelps, Lucas, and subsequent developments, alongside macro and microeconomic evidence, the chapter examines the role of human capital in driving innovation and growth, emphasizing how different types of human capital matter at different stages of development, and discussing obstacles to accumulation and evidence from policy interventions.

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Wedges: A Microeconomic Perspective On Misallocation, Lauren Falcao Bergquist, Daniel Lashkari, Eric Verhoogen Jan 2026

Wedges: A Microeconomic Perspective On Misallocation, Lauren Falcao Bergquist, Daniel Lashkari, Eric Verhoogen

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

This chapter, prepared for the Handbook of Development Economics (Vol. 6), reviews recent microeconomic evidence on the causes of resource misallocation in developing countries. It distinguishes between “technological” and “distortionary” wedges, develops a unified theoretical framework linking market power, taxes, financial frictions, and firm dynamics, and summarizes empirical findings from the “direct approach” to misallocation. The authors emphasize how wedges vary by firm size and discuss policy implications for improving allocative efficiency.

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Information Design And Mechanism Design: An Integrated Framework, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris Jan 2026

Information Design And Mechanism Design: An Integrated Framework, Dirk Bergemann, Tibor Heumann, Stephen Morris

Cowles Foundation Discussion Papers

We develop an integrated framework for information design and mechanism design in screening environments with quasilinear utility. Using the tools of majorization theory and quantile functions, we show that both information design and mechanism design problems reduce to maximizing linear functionals subject to majorization constraints. For mechanism design, the designer chooses allocations weakly majorized by the exogenous inventory. For information design, the designer chooses information structures that are majorized by the prior distribution. When the designer can choose both the mechanism and the information structure simultaneously, then the joint optimization problem becomes bilinear with two majorization constraints. We show that …

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