We study the Lemons Problem when workers have private information on both their skills and their intrinsic motivation. When workers are motivated, ine¢ ciencies due to adverse selection are mitigated and a change in salaries may have unexpected consequences. With a su¢ ciently strong and...

We study optimal contracts offered by two firms competing for the exclusive services of one worker, who is privately informed about her ability and her motivation. Firms differ both in their production technology and in the mission they pursue and a motivated worker is keen to be hired by the...

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 analyze the welfare consequences of a monopolist having additional information about consumers' tastes, beyond the prior distribution; the additional information can be used to charge different prices to different segments of the market, i.e., carry out "third degree price discrimination." We...

We characterize the profit-maximizing mechanism for repeatedly selling a non-durable good in continuous time. The valuation of each agent is private information and changes over time. At the time of contracting every agent privately observes his initial type which influences the evolution of his...

We define and characterize a notion of correlated equilibrium for games with incomplete information, which we call Bayes correlated equilibrium: The set of outcomes that can arise in Bayes Nash equilibria of an incomplete information game where players may have access to additional signals...

We study how the outcomes of a private-value first price auction can vary with bidders' information, for a fixed distribution of private values. In a two bidder, two value, setting, we characterize all combinations of bidder surplus and revenue that can arise, and identify the information...

We consider the design of an optimal auction in which the seller can determine the allocation and the disclosure rule of the mechanism. Thus, in contrast to the standard analysis of a optimal auctions, the seller can explicitly design the disclosure of the information received by each bidder as...

We develop a model of data pricing and targeted advertising. A monopolistic data provider determines the price to access "cookies," i.e., informative signals about individual consumers' preferences. The demand for information is generated by advertisers who seek to tailor their spending to the...

We investigate the role of market transparency in repeated first-price auctions. We consider a setting with independent private and persistent values. We analyze three distinct disclosure regimes regarding the bid and award history. In the minimal disclosure regime each bidder only learns...