When a risky decision involves both skill and chance, success or failure is a signal of the decision maker's skill. Adopting standard models from the career concerns literature, we show that a rational desire to avoid looking unskilled may help explain several anomalies associated with prospect...

Sellers benefit on average from revealing information about their goods to buyers, but the incentive to exaggerate undermines the credibility of seller statements. When multiple goods are being auctioned, we show that ordinal cheap talk, which reveals a complete or partial ordering of the...

How does lie detection constrain the potential for one person to persuade another to change her action? We consider a model of Bayesian persuasion in which the Receiver can detect lies with positive probability. We show that the Sender lies more when the lie detection probability increases. As...

We approach the design of anti-discriminatory labor market regulation as a delegation problem. A private firm (the agent) is repeatedly faced with the opportunity of hiring one among several applicants to fill its vacancies. The firm is biased against applicants from some demographic group, and...

This survey provides an overview of theoretical and empirical research on information flows in corporations. It highlights key frictions preventing effective information flows and discusses how organizational structure and corporate governance can alleviate these frictions, focusing on three...

Principal-agent models take outside options, determining participation and incentive constraints, as given. We construct a general equilibrium model where workers' reservation wages and the maximum punishment acceptable before workers quit are instead determined endogenously. We simultaneously...