techreports by Andrea Blasco
We investigate the factors driving workers' decisions to generate public goods inside an organiza... more We investigate the factors driving workers' decisions to generate public goods inside an organization through a randomized solicitation of workplace improvement proposals in a medical center with 1200 employees. We find that pecuniary incentives, such as winning a prize, generate a threefold increase in participation compared to non-pecuniary incentives alone, such as prestige or recognition. Participation is also increased by a solicitation appealing to improving the workplace. However, emphasizing the patient mission of the organization led to countervailing effects on participation. Overall, these results are consistent with workers having multiple underlying motivations to contribute to public goods inside the organization consisting of a combination of pecuniary and altruistic incentives associated with the mission of the organization.
articles by Andrea Blasco
This paper reviews the empirical evidence on commercial media bias (i.e., advertisers influence o... more This paper reviews the empirical evidence on commercial media bias (i.e., advertisers influence over media accuracy) and then introduces a simple model to summarize the main elements of the theoretical literature. The analysis provides three main policy insights for media regulators: (i) Media regulators should target their monitoring efforts towards news contents upon which advertisers are likely to share similar preferences. (ii) In advertising industries characterized by high correlation in products' qualities, an increase in the degree of competition may translate into a lower accuracy of news reports. (iii) A sufficiently high degree of competition in the market for news drives out commercial media bias.
incollections by Andrea Blasco
We consider a population of agents that can choose between two risky technologies: an old one for... more We consider a population of agents that can choose between two risky technologies: an old one for which they know the expected outcome, and a new one for which they have only a prior. We confront different environments. In the benchmark case agents are isolated and can perform costly experiments to infer the quality of the new technology. In the other cases agents are settled in a network and can observe the outcomes of neighbors. We analyze long-run efficiency of the models. We observe that in expectations the quality of the new technology may be overestimated when there is a network spread of information. This is due to a herding behavior that is efficient only when the new technology is really better than the old one. We also observe that between different network structures there is not a clear dominance.
Uploads
techreports by Andrea Blasco
articles by Andrea Blasco
incollections by Andrea Blasco