What are the welfare effects of a policy that facilitates for insurance customers to privately and covertly learn about their accident risks? We endogenize the information structure in Stiglitz's classic monopoly insurance model. We first show that his results are robust: For a small information...

We study contracting between a consumer and an expert. The expert can invest in diagnosis to obtain a noisy signal about whether a low-cost service is sufficient or whether a high-cost treatment is required to solve the consumer’s problem. This involves moral hazard because diagnosis effort...

We study a monopoly insurance model with endogenous information acquisition. Through a continuous effort choice, consumers can determine the precision of a privately observed signal that is informative about their accident risk. The equilibrium effort is, depending on parameter values, either...

We analyze how transparency affects information acquisition in a bargaining context, where proposers may chose to purchase information about the unknown outside option of their bargaining partner. Although information acquisition is excessive in all our scenarios we find that the bargaining...

Consider a market where an informed monopolist sets the price for a good or asset with a value unknown to potential buyers. Upon observing the price, buyers may pay some cost for information about the value before deciding on purchases. To restrict buyer beliefs we generalize the idea of the...

Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer --- the seller --- follows from a non--trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer--induced certification acts as an inspection device, whence...