We develop a general model, with the exponential bandit as a special case, in which high-ability agents are more likely to achieve early success but also learn faster that their project is not promising. These counteracting effects give rise to a signaling model in which the single-crossing...

In this paper, we consider a dynamic signaling model of an R&D market in which a researcher can choose either a safe project (exploitation) or a risky project (exploration) at each instance. We argue that there are substantial efficiency gains from rewarding minor innovations above their social...

We consider a "tenure-clock problem" in which a principal may set a deadline by which she needs to evaluate an agent's ability and decides whether to promote him or not. We embed this problem in a continuous-time model with both hidden action and hidden information, where the principal must...

A standard incomplete-information war of attrition is extended to incorporate experimentation and private learning. We obtain a characterization of all equilibria in this extended setup and use this setup to illuminate a tradeoff between short-run and long-run gains of experimentation. The...

We consider an environment in which a principal hires an agent and evaluates his productivity over time in an ongoing relationship. The problem is embedded in a continuoustime model with both hidden action and hidden information, where the principal must induce the agent to exert effort to...

Auctions are a popular and prevalent form of trading mechanism, despite the restriction that the seller cannot price-discriminate among potential buyers. To understand why this is the case, we consider an auction-like environment in which a seller with an indivisible object negotiates with two...

This paper provides a general analysis of signaling under doublecrossing preferences with a continuum of types. There are natural economic environments where indifference curves of two types cross twice, so that the celebrated single-crossing property fails to hold. Equilibrium exhibits a...

The class of double-crossing preferences, where signaling is cheaper for higher types than for lower types at low signaling levels and the opposite is true at high signaling levels, underlines the phenomenon of countersignaling. We show that under the D1 refinement, the equilibrium signaling...

Despite widespread use in online transactions, rating systems only provide summary statistics of buyers' diverse opinions at best. To investigate the consequences of this coarse form of information aggregation, we consider a dynamic lemons market in which buyers share their evaluations...