We study preferences for timing of resolution of objective uncertainty in a menuchoice model with two stages of information arrival. We characterize a general class of utility representations called hidden action representations, which interpret an intrinsic preference for timing of resolution...

Weitzman's search model requires that, conditional on stopping, the agent only takes boxes which have already been inspected. We relax this assumption and allow the agent to take any uninspected box without inspecting its contents when stopping. Thus, each uninspected box is now a potential...

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers' productivities from their education choices. In reality, firms also use sophisticated pre-employment auditing to learn workers' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between...

We analyze a competitive labor market in which workers signal their productivities through education à la Spence (1973), and firms have the option of auditing to learn workers' productivities. Audits are costly and non-contractible. We characterize the trade-offs between signaling by workers...

The matching literature commonly rules out that market design itself shapes agent preferences. Underlying this premise is the assumption that agents know their own preferences at the outset and that preferences do not change throughout the matching process. Under this assumption, a centralized...

Every year during school and college admissions, students and their parents devote considerable time and effort to acquiring costly information about their own preferences. In a market where students are ranked by universities based on exam scores, we explore ways to reduce wasteful information...

In the Yes/No game, like in the ultimatum game, proposer and respondercan share a monetary reward. In both games the proposer suggests a rewarddistribution which the responder can accept or reject (yielding 0-payoffs). Thegames only differ in that the responder does (not) learn the suggested...

This paper analyses individual information acquisition in an ultimatum game with aprioriunknown outside options. We find that while individual play seems to accord reasonablywell with the distribution of empirical behavior, contestants seem to grossly overweighthe value of information. While...

We study centralized many-to-many matching in markets where agents have private information about (vertical) characteristics that determine match values. Our analysis reveals how matching patterns reflect cross-subsidization between sides. Agents are endogenously partitioned into consumers and...