This paper studies the role of advertising and prices as signals of quality in a purely static setting, where repeat purchases are suppressed altogether, but where advertising affects demand directly. We first show, under standard regularity assumptions, that the high-quality firm will distort...

We analyze how duopoly competition affects the incentives of firms to signal quality through prices. One firm has a high quality, the other a low, but initially potential customers are unable to verify who has the high quality. The incentives are such that the high quality firm prefers to reveal...

This paper considers price and advertising decisions by a monopolist manufacturer who is privately informed about the strength of consumer demand. Consumers respond to advertising and to the retail price chosen by an uninformed retailer on the basis of his beliefs about demand. This signaling...

We consider first-price and second-price auctions with asymmetric buyers, and examine whether pre-auction offers to a subset of buyers are profitable. A single offer is never profitable prior to a second-price auction, but may be profitable prior to a first-price auction. However, a sequence of...

Asymmetric information and fear of acquiring a "lemon" may explain the paucity of foreign investment in emerging market economies. If investors are uncertain about the profitability of investments, intrinsically inefficient, temporary partnerships or joint ventures may serve as mechanisms...

In the economics literature, various views on the likely (efficiency) effects of information exchange, communication between firms and market transparency present themselves. Often these views on information flows are highly conflicting. On the one hand, it is argued that increased information...