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 …

We study the optimal entry fee in a symmetric private value first-price auction with signaling, in which the … auction has a unique fully separating equilibrium bidding function. When the bidders’ sensibility for the signaling concern is …