We explore through both an economics and regulatory lens the frictions associated with credit rating agencies in the aftermath of the financial crisis. While ratings and other public signals are an efficient response to scale economies in information production, these also can discourage...

We study firms' incentives to acquire private information on cost in a duopoly signaling game. Firms first choose how much to invest in information acquisition and then engage in dynamic price competition. In equilibrium firms acquire too little information from the perspective of industry...

The general idea of this work is to analyse how a banking concentration process can generate information asymmetries causing credit rationing in specific sectors of the economy. To perform this analysis will be used a real and not a theoretical framework as it was the bank concentration process...

We examine the equilibrium interaction between a market for price information (controlled by a gatekeeper) and the homogenous product market it serves. The gatekeeper charges fees to firms that advertise prices on its Internet site and to consumers who access the list of advertised prices....

We measure learning and forgetting dynamics using a panel with four million monthly credit card statements. Through negative feedback -- i.e. paying a fee -- consumers learn to avoid future fees. Paying a fee last month reduces fee payment in the current month by 40%. Monthly fee payments fall...

The paper examines why capital didn't flow from the rich to the poor. The problems identified are categorized in three broad categories: lack of complementary human capital, information asymmetries and transaction costs for small loan sizes. It explains how moneylenders solve the information...

Casual empiricism suggests higher quality is associated with greater variety. However, recent theoretical and empirical research has either not considered this link, or has been unable to establish unambiguous predictions about the relationship between quality and variety. In this paper we...

In this paper, we describe the implementation of an information-sharing platform, got-toilet-paper.com. We create this web page in response to the COVID-19 pandemic to help the Pittsburgh, PA community share information about congestion and product shortages in supermarkets. We show that the...

This paper investigates an operation mechanism for mutual aid platforms to develop more sustainably and profitably. A mutual aid platform is an online risk-sharing platform for risk-heterogeneous participants, and the platform extracts revenues by charging participants commission and...

I study the effects of improved public information on equilibrium welfare and price dispersion, providing sufficient conditions for negative and positive effects. Public information affects welfare by reducing excessive (though rational) pessimism induced by sequential learning. Reduced...