EconometricaPub Date : 2025-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA22072
Ricardo Alonso, Gerard Padró i Miquel
{"title":"Competitive Capture of Public Opinion","authors":"Ricardo Alonso, Gerard Padró i Miquel","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22072","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Two opposed interested parties (IPs) compete to influence citizens with heterogeneous priors which receive news items produced by a variety of sources. The IPs fight to capture the coverage conveyed in these items. We characterize the equilibrium level of capture of item as well as the equilibrium level of information transmission. Capture increases the prevalence of the ex ante most informative messages and can explain the empirical distribution of slant at the news-item level. Opposite capturing efforts do not cancel each other and instead undermine social learning as rational citizens discount informative messages. Citizen skepticism makes efforts to capture the news strategic substitutes. Because of strategic substitution, competition for influence is compatible with horizontal differentiation between successful media. In equilibrium, rational citizens choose to consume messages from aligned sources despite knowledge of the bias in a manner consistent with recent empirical evidence.</p>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1265-1297"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740148","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2025-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA23706
Victor Chernozhukov, Mert Demirer, Esther Duflo, Iván Fernández-Val
{"title":"Reply to: Comments on “Fisher–Schultz Lecture: Generic Machine Learning Inference on Heterogeneous Treatment Effects in Randomized Experiments, With an Application to Immunization in India”","authors":"Victor Chernozhukov, Mert Demirer, Esther Duflo, Iván Fernández-Val","doi":"10.3982/ECTA23706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA23706","url":null,"abstract":"<p><span>We warmly thank Kosuke Imai, Michael Lingzhi Li, and Stefan Wager</span> for their gracious and insightful comments. We are particularly encouraged that both pieces recognize the importance of the research agenda the lecture laid out, which we see as critical for applied researchers. It is also great to see that both underscore the potential of the basic approach we propose—targeting summary features of the CATE after proxy estimation with sample splitting.</p><p>We are also happy that both papers push us (and the reader) to continue thinking about the inference problem associated with sample splitting. We recognize that our current paper is only scratching the surface of this interesting agenda. Our proposal is certainly not the only option, and it is exciting that both papers provide and assess alternatives. Hopefully, this will generate even more work in this area.</p><p>One potential concern with our approach is that it is demanding in terms of data, since it relies on repeated splitting of data into two parts: one used for CATE signal extraction and another used for post-processing. To examine potential improvements, Wager's discussion focuses on the special problem of testing the null effect—that is, whether the CATE function is zero. It is a specific setting, as typical machine learning algorithms are in fact able to learn the zero function consistently even in high-dimensional settings.<sup>1</sup> Nonetheless, the problem of testing the null of a zero-CATE remains very important.</p><p>Fixing a <i>single</i> split of data into <i>K</i> folds, <span>Wager</span> (<span>2024</span>) investigates relative gains in power generated by the sequential inference approach of <span>Luedtke and Van Der Laan</span> (<span>2016</span>). This approach uses progressively more data to estimate the “signal” and then generates a sequence of statistics to test if the “signal” is zero. The statistics can be aggregated to form a “single-split” <i>p</i>-value using the martingale properties of the construction. Wager shows in Monte Carlo experiments (reproduced below) that this improves power over a method of taking the median <i>p</i>-value over <i>K</i> equal-sized folds (which is not the method we propose, but is a sensible benchmark). It also outperforms the “naïve” approach that relies on cross-fitting à la the debiased machine learning (DML) approach, which is asymptotically valid in this special setting but suffers from size distortions.<sup>2</sup></p><p>We believe that Wager's proposal is potentially a fruitful complement to what we propose, since we can use the sequential estimation within our “multiple-split” approach. We now show that this combination generates further size and power improvements.</p><p>In what follows, we report results from a numerical simulation using the same experiment and implementation details as in <span>Wager</span> (<span>2024</span>).<sup>3</sup> As in Wager, we consider the following “single-split” approaches:","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1177-1181"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA23706","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2025-07-30DOI: 10.3982/ECTA934FES
{"title":"Fellows of the Econometric Society July, 2025","authors":"","doi":"10.3982/ECTA934FES","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA934FES","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 4","pages":"1497-1517"},"PeriodicalIF":7.1,"publicationDate":"2025-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144740469","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2025-06-10DOI: 10.3982/ECTA21182
Benjamin Vatter
{"title":"Quality Disclosure and Regulation: Scoring Design in Medicare Advantage","authors":"Benjamin Vatter","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21182","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21182","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>Policymakers and market intermediaries often use quality scores to alleviate asymmetric information about product quality. Scores affect the demand for quality and, in equilibrium, its supply. Equilibrium effects break the rule whereby more information is always better, and the optimal design of scores must account for them. In the context of Medicare Advantage, I find that consumers' information is limited, and quality is inefficiently low. A simple design alleviates these issues and increases total welfare by 3.7 monthly premiums. More than half of the gains stem from scores' effect on quality rather than information. Scores can outperform full-information outcomes by regulating inefficient oligopolistic quality provision, and a binary certification of quality attains 98% of this welfare. Scores are informative even when coarse; firms' incentives are to produce quality at the scoring threshold, which consumers know. The primary design challenge of scores is to dictate thresholds and thus regulate quality.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 3","pages":"959-1001"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA21182","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144244934","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2025-06-10DOI: 10.3982/ECTA21075
Karun Adusumilli
{"title":"Risk and Optimal Policies in Bandit Experiments","authors":"Karun Adusumilli","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21075","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We provide a decision-theoretic analysis of bandit experiments under local asymptotics. Working within the framework of diffusion processes, we define suitable notions of asymptotic Bayes and minimax risk for these experiments. For normally distributed rewards, the minimal Bayes risk can be characterized as the solution to a second-order partial differential equation (PDE). Using a limit of experiments approach, we show that this PDE characterization also holds asymptotically under both parametric and non-parametric distributions of the rewards. The approach further describes the state variables it is asymptotically sufficient to restrict attention to, and thereby suggests a practical strategy for dimension reduction. The PDEs characterizing minimal Bayes risk can be solved efficiently using sparse matrix routines or Monte Carlo methods. We derive the optimal Bayes and minimax policies from their numerical solutions. These optimal policies substantially dominate existing methods such as Thompson sampling; the risk of the latter is often twice as high.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 3","pages":"1003-1029"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA21075","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144244935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2025-06-10DOI: 10.3982/ECTA21394
Milena Almagro, Tomás Domínguez-Iino
{"title":"Location Sorting and Endogenous Amenities: Evidence From Amsterdam","authors":"Milena Almagro, Tomás Domínguez-Iino","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21394","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21394","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>This paper shows the endogeneity of amenities plays a crucial role in determining the welfare distribution of a city's residents. We quantify this mechanism by building a dynamic model of residential choice with heterogeneous households, where consumption amenities are the equilibrium outcome of a market for non-tradables. We estimate our model using Dutch microdata and leveraging variation in Amsterdam's spatial distribution of tourists as a demand shifter, finding significant heterogeneity in residents' preferences over amenities and in the supply responses of amenities to changes in demand composition. This two-way heterogeneity dictates the degree of horizontal differentiation across neighborhoods, residential sorting, and inequality. Finally, we show the distributional effects of mass tourism depend on this heterogeneity: following rent increases due to growing tourist demand for housing, younger residents—whose amenity preferences are closest to tourists—are compensated by amenities tilting in their favor, while the losses of older residents are amplified.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 3","pages":"1031-1071"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA21394","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144244937","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2025-06-10DOI: 10.3982/ECTA21319
Federico Cingano, Filippo Palomba, Paolo Pinotti, Enrico Rettore
{"title":"Making Subsidies Work: Rules versus Discretion","authors":"Federico Cingano, Filippo Palomba, Paolo Pinotti, Enrico Rettore","doi":"10.3982/ECTA21319","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA21319","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We estimate the employment effects of a large program of public investment subsidies to private firms that ranked applicants on a score reflecting both objective rules and local politicians' discretion. Leveraging the rationing of funds as an ideal Regression Discontinuity Design, we characterize the heterogeneity of treatment effects and cost-per-new-job across inframarginal firms and estimate the cost-effectiveness of subsidies under factual and counterfactual allocations. Firms ranking high on objective rules and firms preferred by local politicians generated larger employment growth on average, but the latter did so at a higher cost per job. We estimate that relying only on objective criteria would reduce the cost per job by 11%, while relying only on political discretion would increase such cost by 42%.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 3","pages":"747-778"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA21319","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144244939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
EconometricaPub Date : 2025-06-10DOI: 10.3982/ECTA22351
Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Roberto Colomboni, Maximilian Kasy
{"title":"Adaptive Maximization of Social Welfare","authors":"Nicolò Cesa-Bianchi, Roberto Colomboni, Maximilian Kasy","doi":"10.3982/ECTA22351","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA22351","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 <p>We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred. Response functions are learned through experimentation.</p>\u0000 <p>We derive a lower bound on regret, and a matching adversarial upper bound for a variant of the Exp3 algorithm. Cumulative regret grows at a rate of <i>T</i><sup>2/3</sup>. This implies that (i) welfare maximization is harder than the multiarmed bandit problem (with a rate of <i>T</i><sup>1/2</sup> for finite policy sets), and (ii) our algorithm achieves the optimal rate. For the stochastic setting, if social welfare is concave, we can achieve a rate of <i>T</i><sup>1/2</sup> (for continuous policy sets), using a dyadic search algorithm.</p>\u0000 <p>We analyze an extension to nonlinear income taxation, and sketch an extension to commodity taxation. We compare our setting to monopoly pricing (which is easier), and price setting for bilateral trade (which is harder).</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":50556,"journal":{"name":"Econometrica","volume":"93 3","pages":"1073-1104"},"PeriodicalIF":6.6,"publicationDate":"2025-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.3982/ECTA22351","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144244929","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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