Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...

Many facts are learned through the intermediation of individuals with special access to information, such as law enforcement officers, officials with a security clearance, or experts with specific knowledge. This paper considers whether societies can learn about such facts when information is...

In many labor markets, e.g., for lawyers, consultants, MBA students, and professional sport players, workers get offered and sign long-term contracts even though waiting could reveal significant information about their capabilities. This phenomenon is called unraveling. We examine the link...

We analyse incentive problems in team and partnership structures where the only available information to condition a contract on is some noisy ranking of the partners' efforts. This enables us to ensure both first best efficient effort levels for all partners and the redistribution of output...

We conduct a contest experiment where participants can invest in increasing both the mean and the spread of an uncertain performance variable. Subjects are treated with different prize schemes and in accordance with theory we observe substantial investments in spread. We find that both types of...