Emir Kamenica

Suspense and Surprise

We model demand for noninstrumental information, drawing on the idea that people derive entertainment utility from suspense and surprise. A period has more suspense if the variance of the next period’s beliefs is greater. A period has more surprise if the current belief is further from the last period’s belief. Under these definitions, we analyze the optimal way to reveal information over time so as to maximize expected suspense or surprise experienced by a Bayesian audience. We apply our results to the design of mystery novels, political primaries, casinos, game shows, auctions, and sports.

Helping Consumers Know Themselves

Firms sometimes know more about a consumers expected usage than the consumer herself. We explore the consequences of this reversal in the information asymmetry. We analyze the consequences of making consumers more informed about themselves. While making consumers more informed decreases their expenditure conditional on a given set of prices, equilibrium prices may increase, offsetting the direct benefit of information. We discuss theoretical and practical issues surrounding so-called RECAP regulation that would require firms to provide each consumer with information about her own usage of the firms product.

Racial Preferences in Dating: Evidence from a Speed Dating Experiment

We examine racial preferences in dating using data that allow for the direct observation of decisions of randomly paired individuals in a Speed Dating experiment. Females exhibit stronger racial preferences than males. Furthermore, we observe stronger same race preferences for blacks and Asians than for Hispanics and whites. Accounting for self-reported shared interests considerably reduces the observed effect of racial preferences.

Bayesian persuasion with multiple senders and rich signal spaces

A number of senders with no ex ante private information publicly choose signals whose realizations they observe privately. Senders then convey verifiable messages about their signal realizations to a receiver who takes a non-contractible action that affects the welfare of all players. The space of available signals includes all conditional distributions of signal realizations and allows any sender to choose a signal that is arbitrarily correlated with signals of others. We characterize the information revealed in pure-strategy equilibria and show that greater competition tends to increase the amount of information revealed.

Searching for a Mate: Theory and Experimental Evidence

We provide a theoretical framework for studying mate search and selection based on a two-sided matching model. Guided by the model, we study dating behavior using data from an experimental dating market, where we generate random matching of subjects and create random variation in the number of potential partners. Male selectivity is invariant to group size, while female selectivity is strongly increasing in group size. This difference implies that the female net utility function of dating is more concave in the number of dates. We also report the valuation of various attributes by men and women; in accordance with the common stereotype, females put greater weight on intelligence relative to males, while males put relatively greater weight on physical appearance. Further, we find that males are less attracted to females with intelligence or ambition greater than their own.

Representations of information structures

In many problems of design of mechanisms and multi-agent systems, the system designer has control over the information environment. What is the optimal design given the goals of the system designer? We discuss several ways of representing information structures. Each representation simplifies a particular class of optimization problems over information structures; we discuss current and potential applications of these representations.

Coming Apart? Cultural Distances in the United States Over Time

We analyze temporal trends in cultural distance between groups in the US defined by income, education, gender, race, and political ideology. We measure cultural distance between two groups as the ability to infer an individuals group based on his or her (i) media consumption, (ii) consumer behavior, (iii) time use, or (iv) social attitudes. Gender difference in time use decreased between 1965 and 1995 and has remained constant since. Differences in social attitudes by political ideology and income have increased over the last four decades. Whites and non-whites have converged somewhat on attitudes but have diverged in consumer behavior. For all other demographic divisions and cultural dimensions, cultural distance has been broadly constant over time.