Personal privacy is studied in the context of a competitive product (or labor) market. In the first stage of the game, firms that sell homogeneous goods or services (e.g., insurance, credit, or rental housing) post prices they promise to charge approved applicants. In the second stage, each...

We model a competitive labor market with heterogeneous firms of varying productivities, and consider two information-collection processes: searching for "good news" about applicants, and searching for "bad news." Under the former, firms seek positive signals to qualify applicants, and under the...

We model the role of dealers in information diffusion in over-the-counter (OTC) markets. A dealer maintains relationships with a network of both informed customers who trade to profit from private information pertaining to asset values and risk-averse liquidity customers who trade to meet...

This paper analyses budget-constrained, nonpoint source (NPS) pollution control with costly information acquisition and learning. To overcome the inherent ill-posed statistical problem in NPS pollution data the sequential entropy filter is applied to the sediment load management program for...

We consider implementability and the welfare effects of a partial announcement policy using a model of a beauty contest where agents' actions are strategic complements and where their decisions on public information acquisition are endogenous. The following results are obtained: i) if the...

This paper examines the welfare effects of informational intermediation. A (shortlived) seller sets the price of a product that is sold through a (long-lived) informational intermediary. The intermediary can disclose information about the product to consumers, earns a fixed percentage of the...

The Rule of Reason, which has come to dominate modern antitrust law, allows defendants the opportunity to justify their conduct by demonstrating “procompetitive” effects. Seizing the opportunity, defendants have begun offering increasingly numerous and creative explanations for their...

We show that experience good sellers facing myopic buyers can solve the inherent moral hazard problem by communicating their observation of quality before trade, provided that communication is part of their public track record. Such cheap-talk communication, if trusted, allows market prices to...