Adverse selection harms workers, but benefits firms able to identify talent. An informed intermediary expropriates its agents' ability by threatening to fire and expose them to undervaluation of their skill. Agents' track record gradually reduces the intermediary's information advantage. We show...

This paper studies the optimal refund mechanism when an uninformed buyer can privately acquire information about his valuation over time. In principle, a refund mechanism can specify the odds that the seller requires the product returned while issuing a (partial) refund, which we call stochastic...

A buyer wishes to purchase a durable good from a seller who in each period chooses a mechanism under limited commitment. The buyer's value is binary and fully persistent. We show that posted prices implement all equilibrium outcomes of an infinite-horizon, mechanism-selection game. Despite being...