We study dynamic signaling in a game of stochastic stakes. Each period, a privately informed agent of binary type chooses whether to continue receiving a return that is an increasing function of both her reputation and an exogenous public stakes variable or to irreversibly exit the game. A...

Credit-rating agencies have an incentive to maintain a public reputation for credibility among investors but also have an incentive to develop a second, private reputation for leniency among issuers. We show that in markets with few issuers, such as markets for structured assets, these...

We introduce a class of two-player dynamic games to study the effectiveness of screening in a principal-agent problem. In every period, the principal chooses either to irreversibly stop the game or to continue, and the agent chooses an action if the principal chooses to continue. The agent's...

Many service industries, including the medical and legal professions in some countries, display a gated structure. Rather than approaching a final producer directly, a consumer will first seek a referral from an intermediary. In this paper, we provide one possible explanation for such an...

Many service industries, including the medical and legal professions in some countries, display a gated structure. Rather than approaching a final producer directly, a consumer will first seek a referral from an intermediary. Such an industry structure might help to alleviate adverse selection...

Governments must usually take policy decisions with an imperfect knowledge of the economic actors' type or the actors' effort level. These issues are addressed within the framework of classic adverse selection or moral hazard models. I discuss in this paper how would the government’s and the...

In this paper we analyze the frequently observed phenomenon that (i) some members of a team (black sheep) exhibit behavior disliked by other (honest) team members, who (ii) nevertheless refrain from reporting such misbehavior to the authorities (they set up a wall of silence). Much cited...

We study the role of information about the multiplier in a finitely repeated investment game. A high multiplier increases the reputational incentives of a trustee, leading to more repayments. Our perfect Bayesian equilibrium analysis shows that if the trustee is privately informed about the...

We analyze the extent to which efficient trade is possible in an ongoing relationship between impatient agents with hidden valuations (i.i.d. over time), restricting attention to equilibria that satisfy ex post incentive constraints in each period. With ex ante budget balance, efficient trade...

We examine multistage information transmission with voluntary monetary transfer in the framework of Crawford and Sobel (1982). In our model, an informed expert can send messages to an uninformed decision maker more than once, and the uninformed decision maker can pay money to the informed expert...