Decisions to donate time or money for charitable purposes are typically seen as make-or-buy decisions, implying that there should be a clear distinction between individuals engaging in one of these two forms of giving and that this distinction should be somehow linked to opportunity costs. But...

We study ex post information rents in sequential screening models where the agent receives private ex ante and ex post information. The principal has to pay ex post information rents for preventing the agent to coordinate lies about his ex ante and ex post information. When the agent's ex ante...

Several recent papers employ the regression discontinuity design (RDD) to estimate the causal effect of a diploma (or similar credentials) on wages. Using a simple model of asymmetric information, I show that RDD estimates the information value of a diploma. A positive information value arises...

We study competitive equilibrium in a signaling economy with heterogeneously informed buyers. In terms of the classic Spence (1973) model of job market signaling, firms have access to direct but imperfect information about worker types, in addition to observing their education. Firms can be...

If bidders are uncertain whether the auctioneer sticks to the announced reserve, some bidders respond by strategic non-participation, speculating that the auctioneer may revoke the reserve. However, the reserve inadvertently signals the auctioneer's type, which drives a unique separating and a...

In games with strategic complementarities, public information about the state of the world has a larger impact on equilibrium actions than private information of the same precision, because the former is more informative about the likely behavior of others. This may lead to welfare-reducing...

When a principal’s monitoring information is private (non-verifiable), the agent should be concerned that the principal could misrepresent the information to reduce the agent’s wage or collect a monetary penalty. Restoring credibility may lead to an extreme waste of resources - the so-called...

This paper studies a contracting problem where agents' cost of actions is private information. With two actions, this leads to a two-dimensional screening problem with moral hazard. There is a natural one-dimensional ordering of types when there is both adverse selection and moral hazard....