This paper investigates whether recourse to a consultant always enhances decision making. Advice given by a consultant changes the manager’s belief about his own decision-making ability. This change in belief alters the manager’s incentives to make a decision. Taking into account this...

We examine the strategic non-revelation of information by patent applicants. In a model of a bilateral search of information, we show that patent applicants may conceal information, and that examiners make their screening intensity contingent upon the received information. We then analyze the...

We investigate the economic importance of implicit quality incentives in an agricultural market that lacks the institutional capacity for measuring quality verifiably. We measure the magnitude of implicit price premiums for quality, and we distinguish empirically between hedonic-pricing and...

This paper investigates the presence of career incentives in arm's-length contracts between wine-grape farmers and wineries in Chile. We observe explicit incentives in pay-for-performance provisions that depend on measurable characteristics of grape quality, and we test for the presence of...