I develop a tractable model of a competitive search market to compare the effects of price-disclosure policies on economic efficiency and surplus distribution among market participants under two-sided quality uncertainty. A regime with full disclosure of past prices is contrasted with a regime in which they are concealed from searching buyers. The main results show that concealing prices benefits efficiency and results in a larger buyer surplus, whereas sellers can use disclosed high past prices as a beneficial commitment device to sustain more favorable quality beliefs and earn higher profits from forward-looking buyers. 

This paper proposes a behavioral foundation for information design when information changes both what a loss-averse agent believes and the reference point, driven by rational expectation, relative to which he evaluates esteem. This dual role of the same expectation creates a central tension: a more favorable belief raises both confidence and the esteem reference, which compresses prospective gains and enlarges prospective losses. This reference channel can weaken, reverse, or render nonmonotone the canonical motivational role of favorable beliefs. The result is a unified preference-based taxonomy of motivating beliefs — high, low, intermediate, or polarized—that motivate and sort rational agents according to their preferences over the psychological stakes defined by those beliefs.

This study examines relative reputational herding in a social-learning environment with uncertainty about a persistent state, where agents are also evaluated for an unobserved type. A predecessor's action affects social learning about the state, and the reputation generated by that action becomes the evaluative reference inherited by the next generation. Agents may agree on the state but choose differently under inherited references, whereas agents who disagree on the state may take the same action because the reputational return to a choice depends on the prevailing reference. Herding depends jointly on shared information and reputational references set by past actions.

Voluntary carbon offset fees are typically proportional to the principal product's carbon footprint. We evaluate a flat offset scheme—which equates offset fees across low- and high-footprint products, making low-footprint options disproportionately expensive—with the conventional proportional offset scheme. Across two experiments, we document an unintuitive result: among offset-paying consumers, the flat scheme increases the choice share of low-footprint goods, despite its disproportionate expensiveness. Our findings are consistent with models of crowding-out of prosocial motivation and attribute salience in consumer choice.