This paper considers a firm whose potential employees have private information on both their productivity and the extent of their fairness concerns. Fairness is modelled as inequity aversion, where fair-minded workers suffer if their colleagues get more income net of production costs. Screening...

This paper considers a firm whose potential employees have private information on both their productivity and the extent of their fairness concerns. Fairness is modelled as inequity aversion, where fair-minded workers suffer if their colleagues get more income net of production costs. Screening...

We extend Akerlof ’s (1970) “Market for Lemons” by assuming that some buyers are overconfident. Buyers in our model receive a noisy signal about the quality of the good that is at display for sale. Overconfident buyers do not update according to Bayes’ rule but take the noisy signal at...

This paper extends the standard competitive adverse selection model by allowing for qualitatively different information structures of agents on the informed side of the market. Using the stylized framework of the market for used cars, we examine the welfare properties of equilibria under the...

We study an adverse selection problem in which information that is imperfectly correlated with the agent's type becomes public ex post. Unbounded penalties are ruled out by assuming that the agent is wealth constrained. The following conclusions emerge. If the agent's utility is increasing in...

The modern literature on city formation and development, for example the New Economic Geography literature, has studied the agglomeration of agents in size or mass. We investigate agglomeration in sorting or by type of worker, that implies agglomeration in size when worker populations differ by...

The empirical literature has found evidence of locational sorting of workers by wage or skill. We show that such sorting can be driven by asymmetric information in the labor market, specifically when firms do not know if a particular worker is of high or low skill. In a model with two types and...