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...

This paper studies strategic behavior in product markets with asymmetric information. A real options model is developed to investigate information revelation and signaling role capital structure. Information revelation is ensured through a learning mechanism that stems from the real options...

Reputation concerns can discipline agents to take costly effort and generate good outcomes. But what if outcomes are not always observed? We consider a model of reputation with shifting observability, and ask how this affects agents' incentives. We identify a novel and intuitive mechanism by...

This paper studies the impact of behavioral and non-behavioral information contained in consumer credit reports on the credit market. A repeated game of incomplete information between a borrower and a sequence of lenders is considered. Lenders' beliefs regarding the borrower's type depend on the...

We study non-stationary dynamic decentralized markets with adverse selection in which trade is bilateral and prices are determined by bargaining. Examples include labor markets, housing markets, and markets for financial assets. We characterize equilibrium, and identify the dynamics of...

We analyze a cheap talk model in which an informed sender and an uninformed receiver engage in finite-period communication before the receiver chooses a project. During the communication phase, in each period, the sender sends a cheap talk message and the receiver voluntarily pays money for the...

We study market dynamics when an owner learns over time about the quality of her asset. Since this information is private, the owner sells strategically to a less informed buyer following sufficient negative information. In response, market prices feature a "U-shape" relative to the length of...

We consider a manufacturer selling to a retailer with private demand information arising dynamically over an infinite time horizon. Under a backlogging model, we show that the manufacturer's optimal dynamic long-term contract takes a simple form: in the first period, based on her private demand...

In this paper, we examine a supply chain in which a single supplier sells to a downstream newsvendor-type retailer. We make two assumptions that enrich this simple and well-understood model. First, we consider a multi-period model, in which the sequence of events is as follows. In a period, t,...

Asymmetric information is an important source of inefficiency when assets (like firms) are transacted. The two main sources of this asymmetry are unobserved idiosyncratic characteristics of the asset (for example, quality) and unobserved idiosyncratic choices (actions done by the current...