Akerlof, Spence and Stiglitz showed that competitive markets can perform very poorly in the presence of informational asymmetry. In this paper I show that if there is a signaling technology which is sufficiently strong (i.e., the marginal cost of signaling declines sufficiently rapidly with...

A rent or transfer is politically contestable when policy decisions are subject to influence by potential beneficiaries and losers. This paper studies contestablility of rents and transfers when contenders place different valuations on the politically allocated prize. Asymmetric valuation...

The theory of market signaling and screening is a cornerstone of the new economics of information. The last two and a half decades have not only witnessed a series of remarkable theoretical developments but also a wide range of applications. This essay examines the key theoretical issues and...