arXiv subjects

Antonio Cabrales

Publications and source records attributed to Antonio Cabrales.

8 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Comparative Statics of Information Acquisition and Risk Aversion

We study how willingness to pay for information depends on risk aversion when a decision maker faces background risk and can acquire information before choosing from a menu of assets. We distinguish investment menus, whose payoffs are procyclical with background wealth, from insurance menus, whose payoffs are countercyclical. Our main results show that the interaction between asset cyclicality and the tail geometry of background risk determines the direction of the comparative statics. When the density of background risk is log-concave, willingness to pay for information decreases with risk aversion for investment menus, whereas with downward-log-convex background risk it increases with risk aversion for insurance menus. The proofs compare the distributions of terminal wealth with and without information and develop new aggregation arguments for state-dependent single-crossing comparisons. We also construct reversals under strictly log-convex tails for investment menus and super-exponential left tails for insurance menus.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Evaluation and Assignment with Networked Competition and Spillovers

This paper studies how organizations should jointly design evaluation rules and assign workers when performance depends on both effort and non-discretionary advantage. Agents choose effort in positions linked by a competition network, while their effective advantage depends on own type and spillovers through a second network. The planner chooses both the assignment and the effort weight in evaluation. Equilibrium effort rises with a position's Katz-Bonacich centrality and falls with effective advantage. The optimal evaluation rule generally differs from true output. When effort is more important in production, the planner lowers the effort weight and uses negative assortative assignment to strengthen incentives. When advantage is more important, the planner raises the effort weight and uses positive assortative assignment to exploit spillovers. We also study a constraint requiring assignments to be pairwise stable, which creates an output loss depending on the intensity of competition.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2026

Optimally designing purpose and meaning at work

Many workers value purpose and meaning in their jobs alongside income, and firms need to align these preferences with profit goals. This paper develops a dynamic model in which firms invest in purpose to enhance job meaning and motivate effort. Workers, who differ in productivity, choose both productive and socialization effort, gaining utility from income and meaning. Purpose accumulates over time through firm investment and interacts with socialization to generate meaning, which boosts productivity. Firms invest in purpose only insofar as it raises profits. We characterize the unique equilibrium, including steady state and transition dynamics. Meaning and purpose rise with the importance workers place on meaning and with firm's patience, but fall with depreciation and socialization costs. The relationship with workers' share of output is nonmonotonic. We also show that some intermediate level of heterogeneity in skills is best for performance. Compared to a worker-owned firm, profit-maximizing firms underinvest in purpose, highlighting a misalignment between firm incentives and worker preferences. The model provides insight into when and why firms adopt purpose-driven practices and underscores the role of diversity in fostering meaning at work.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

The effect of ambiguity in strategic environments: an experiment

We experimentally study a game in which success requires a sufficient total contribution by members of a group. There are significant uncertainties surrounding the chance and the total effort required for success. A theoretical model with max-min preferences towards ambiguity predicts higher contributions under ambiguity than under risk. However, in a large representative sample of the Spanish population (1,500 participants) we find that the ATE of ambiguity on contributions is zero. The main significant interaction with the personal characteristics of the participants is with risk attitudes, and it increases contributions. This suggests that policymakers concerned with ambiguous problems (like climate change) do not need to worry excessively about ambiguity.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2022

The Interactions of Social Norms about Climate Change: Science, Institutions and Economics

We study the evolution of interest about climate change between different actors of the population, and how the interest of those actors affect one another. We first document the evolution individually, and then provide a model of cross influences between them, that we then estimate with a VAR. We find large swings over time of said interest for the general public by creating a Climate Change Index for Europe and the US (CCI) using news media mentions, and little interest among economists (measured by publications in top journals of the discipline). The general interest science journals and policymakers have a more steady interest, although policymakers get interested much later.

econ.GN↗

arXiv2021

Playing with words: Do people exploit loaded language to affect others' decisions for their own benefit?

We report on three pre-registered studies testing whether people in the position of describing a decision problem to decision-makers exploit this opportunity for their benefit, by choosing descriptions that may be potentially beneficial for themselves. In Study 1, recipients of an extreme dictator game (where dictators can either take the whole pie for themselves or give it entirely to the receiver) are asked to choose the instructions used to introduce the game to dictators, among six different instructions that are known from previous research to affect dictators' decisions. The results demonstrate that some dictator game recipients tend to choose instructions that make them more likely to receive a higher payoff. Study 2 shows that people who choose descriptions that make them more likely to receive a higher payoff indeed believe that they will receive a higher payoff. Study 3 shows that receivers are more likely than dictators to choose these descriptions. In sum, our work suggests that some people choose descriptions that are beneficial to themselves; we also found some evidence that deliberative thinking and young age are associated with this tendency.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2020

Pricing group membership

We consider a model where agents differ in their `types' which determines their voluntary contribution towards a public good. We analyze what the equilibrium composition of groups are under centralized and centralized choice. We show that there exists a top-down sorting equilibrium i.e. an equilibrium where there exists a set of prices which leads to groups that can be ordered by level of types, with the first k types in the group with the highest price and so on. This exists both under decentralized and centralized choosing. We also analyze the model with endogenous group size and examine under what conditions is top-down sorting socially efficient. We illustrate when integration (i.e. mixing types so that each group's average type if the same) is socially better than top-down sorting. Finally, we show that top down sorting is efficient even when groups compete among themselves.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2003

Search and Congestion in Complex Networks

A model of communication that is able to cope simultaneously with the problems of search and congestion is presented. We investigate the communication dynamics in model networks and introduce a general framework that enables a search of optimal structures.

cond-mat.stat-mech↗