This paper develops a model of career concerns. The worker's skill is revealed through output, wage is based on expected output, and so on assessed ability. Specifically, effort increases the probability that a skilled worker achieves a one-time breakthrough. Effort levels at different times are...

This paper analyzes the impact of market structure on career concerns. Effort increases the probability that a skilled agent achieves a one-time breakthrough. Wages are based on assessed ability and on expected output. For any wage, the agent works too little, too late. Under short-term...

This paper studies the design of a recommender system for organizing social learning on a product. To improve incentives for early experimentation, the optimal design trades off fully transparent social learning by over-recommending a product (or “spamming”) to a fraction of agents in the...

We provide a simple but novel model of trade agreements that highlights the role of transaction costs, renegotiation and dispute settlement. The model allows us to characterize the appropriate remedy for breach and whether the agreement should be structured as a system of "property rights" or...

We study a dynamic buyer-seller problem in which the good is information and there are no property rights. The potential buyer is reluctant to pay for information whose value to him is uncertain, but the seller cannot credibly convey its value to the buyer without disclosing the information...

We investigate the role of market transparency in repeated first-price auctions. We consider a setting with private and independent values across bidders. The values are assumed to be perfectly persistent over time. We analyze the first-price auction under three distinct disclosure regimes...

Do asset prices aggregate investors’ private information about the ability of financial analysts? We show that as financial analysts become reputable, the market can get trapped: Investors optimally choose to ignore their private information, and blindly follow analyst recommendations. As time...

A game of incomplete information can be decomposed into a basic game and an information structure. The basic game defines the set of actions, the set of payoff states the payoff functions and the common prior over the payoff states. The information structure refers to the signals that the...

We use the theory of abstract convexity to study adverse-selection principal-agent problems and two-sided matching problems, departing from much of the literature by not requiring quasilinear utility. We formulate and characterize a basic underlying implementation duality. We show how this...

This paper studies strategic information transmission in a dynamic environment where, each period, a privately informed expert sends a message and a decision maker takes an action. Our main result is that, in contrast to a static environment, full information revelation is possible. The gradual...