We provide elementary insights into the effectiveness of certification to increase market transparency. In a market with opaque product quality, sellers use certification as a signaling device, while buyers use it as an inspection device. This difference alone implies that seller-certification...

We study contracting between a public good provider and users with private valuations of the good. We show that, once the provider extracts the users' private information, she benefits from manipulating the collective information received from all users when communicating with them. We derive...

We introduce consumers with intrinsic privacy preferences into the monopolistic non-linear pricing model. Next to classical consumers, there is a share of data-sensitive consumers who incur a privacy cost if their purchase reveals information to the monopolist. The monopolist discriminates...

We develop a theory of collective brand reputation for markets in which product quality is jointly determined by local and global players. In a repeated game of imperfect public monitoring, we model collective branding as an aggregation of quality signals generated in different markets. Such...

We study contracting between a public good provider and users with private valuations of the good. We show that, once the provider extracts the users' private information, she benefits from manipulating the collective information received from all users when communicating with them. We derive...

We consider a dynamic screening model where the agent may go bankrupt due to, for example, cash constraints. We model bankruptcy as a verifiable event that occurs whenever the agent makes a per period loss. This leads to less stringent truth-telling constraints than those considered in the...

Restrictions on certifiers' fee structures are irrelevant for maximizing their profits and trade efficiency, and for the implementability of (monotone) distributions of rents. The irrelevance results exploit that certification schemes involve two substitutable dimensions – the fee structure...

We study information flows in an organization with a top management (principal) and multiple subunits (agents) with private information that determines the organization's aggregate efficiency. Under centralization, eliciting the agents' private information may induce the principal to manipulate...

A multi-product monopolist sells sequentially to a buyer who privately learns his valuations. Using big data, the monopolist learns the intertemporal correlation of the buyer's valuations. Perfect price discrimination is generally unattainable – even when the seller learns the correlation...

We study an agency model with vertical hierarchy - the principal, the prime-agent and the sub-agent. The principal faces a project that needs both agents' services. Due to costly communication, the principal receives a report only from the prime-agent, who receives a report from the sub-agent....