We develop a product market theory that explains why firms invest in general training of their workers. We consider a model where firms first decide whether to invest in general human capital, then make wage offers for each others' trained employees and finally engage in imperfect product market...

This paper considers competitive search equilibrium in a market for a good whose quality differs across sellers. Each seller knows the quality of the good that he or she is offering for sale, but buyers cannot observe quality directly. We thus have a "market for lemons" with competitive search...

This paper shows that the opportunity costs resulting from economic interdependence decrease the equilibrium probability of war in an incomplete information game. This result is strongly consistent with existing empirical analyses of the inverse trade-conflict relationship, but is the opposite...

Being perceived as trustworthy comes with substantial economic benefits in many situations. Making other people think you are a trustworthy person may, therefore, be an important motive for charity and other forms of prosocial behavior, provided these activities work as signals of...

We investigate whether incentive schemes signal social norms and thus affect behavior beyond their direct economic consequences. A principal-agent experiment is studied in which prior to contract choice principals are informed about past actions of other agents and thus have more information...

It has been shown that psychological predispositions to benefit others can motivate human cooperation and the evolution of such social preferences can be explained with kin or multi-level selection models. It has also been shown that cooperation can evolve as a costly signal of an unobservable...

People benefit from being perceived as trustworthy. Examples include sellers trying to attract buyers, or candidates in elections trying to attract voters. In a laboratory experiment using exchange games, in which the trustor can choose the trustee, we study whether trustees can signal their...

In the last decade, social media and the Internet have amplified the possibility to spread false information, a.k.a. fake news, which has become a serious threat to the credibility of politicians, organizations, and other decision makers. This paper proposes a framework for investigating the...

In a real-effort experiment, we investigate how the timing of discretionary bonuses affects the relationship between workers and managers. Average output is substantially higher if bonuses are paid in the middle rather than upfront or at the end, as workers increase first-period output to signal...