We study firms' incentives to acquire private information in a setting where subsequent competition leads to firms' later signaling their private information to rivals. Due to signaling, equilibrium prices are distorted, and so while firms benefit from obtaining more precise private information,...

Asymmetric information is a classic example of market failure that undermines the efficiency associated with perfectly competitive market outcomes: the "lemons" market. Credible certification, that substantiates unobservable characteristics of products that consumers value, is often considered a...

Regulators and the firms they regulate interact repeatedly. Over the course of these interactions, the regulator collects data that contains information about the firm's id- iosyncratic private characteristics. This paper studies the case in which the regulator uses information gleaned from past...