signaling, buyers use it for inspection. Seller induced certification leads to more transparency, because it is informative … demand for inspection. Whenever transparency is socially beneficial, seller certification is preferable. It also yields …In markets with quality unobservable to buyers, third-party certification is often the only instrument to increase …

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers …' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between signaling by workers and costly information acquisition by firms. Information … workers have low productivity. Our analysis applies also to other signaling problems, e.g. the financial structure of firms …

characterize the trade-offs between signaling by workers and costly auditing by firms. Auditing is always associated with (partial …

the implementability of (monotone) distributions of rents. The irrelevance results exploit that certification schemes …