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Social norms are based on expectations of what others believe and do, and so they can shift in response to what trendsetters—highly visible media or political leaders—say or do. There is evidence that former President Trump as a trendsetter has weakened norms against expressing anti-immigrant attitudes in the US. As such, we ask: can trendsetters affect anti-immigrant norms across national borders? Can such spillovers be mitigated by countervailing norms attached to a national identity? We conduct two survey experiments to determine if there is potential for a Trump spillover effect in Canada and whether it can be mitigated by norms attached to Canadian identity. We find that priming Trump can weaken norms against expressing anti-immigrant sentiment in Canada. We also find that priming Canadian identity can mitigate the Trump as trendsetter effect, and attaching pro-immigrant norms to Canadian identity can strengthen norms against expressing anti-immigrant attitudes. The potential for a political trendsetter to have effects on immigration attitudes across national borders and the potential for national identity norms to mitigate such effects are important to understand given the recent global spread of anti-immigrant sentiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bølstad and Dinas (2017) propose a model of spatial voting, based on social identity theory, that suggests supporting a candidate/policy on the other side of the ideological spectrum has a disutility that is not accounted for by common spatial models. Unfortunately, the data they use cannot speak directly to whether the disutility arises because individuals perceive their ideology as a social identity. We present the results of an experimental study that measures the norm against crossing the ideological spectrum; tests the cost of doing so, controlling for spatial effects; and demonstrates that this cost increases with the salience and strength of identity norms. By demonstrating the norm mechanism for the disutility of crossing the ideological spectrum, we provide strong support for B&D's model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We attempt to replicate a seminal paper that offered support for the rational expectations hypothesis and reported evidence that markets with certain features aggregate dispersed information. The original results are based on only a few observations, and our attempt to replicate the key findings with an appropriately powered experiment largely fails. The resulting poststudy probability that market performance is better described by rational expectations than the prior information (Walrasian) model under the conditions specified in the original paper is very low. As a result of our failure to replicate, we investigate an alternate set of market features that combines aspects of the original experimental design. For these markets, which include both contingent claims and homogeneous dividend payments (as in many prediction markets), we do find robust evidence of information aggregation in support of the rational expectations model. In total, our results indicate that information aggregation in asset markets is fragile and should only be expected in limited circumstances. This paper was accepted by Bruno Biais, finance. Supplemental Material: The data and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4463. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]