We investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decision maker by providing verifiable information brings out all the relevant information. We find that, if the decision maker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the...

We present a signalling model, based on ideas of Phillip Nelson, in which both the introductory price and the level of directly "uninformative" advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a...