This paper explores the buyer-optimal information structures in a monopolistic screening context with nonlinear production technology. It shows that the buyer's optimal surplus may increase even when the production cost becomes more uncertain or when the efficient surplus decreases. Under a...

This paper studies screening competition under flexible information acquisition and its interaction with price competition. Multiple homogeneous buyers play a game where they simultaneously design independent exams with pre-specified information limit on a binary-type seller. Once observing own...

A principal who has a project with uncertain returns must retain and incentivize an agent using promise of future payments and information control. The agent's effort produces output and facilitates information gathering. The principal controls the informativeness of the agent's effort by...

New technologies such as product simulators and virtual reality now allow firms to provide realistic product usage experiences and reduce buyer uncertainty about product quality. We argue that today's firms should view product design and investments to reduce buyer uncertainty as an integrated...

We derive the optimal selling mechanism for a monopolist who is privately informed about the attributes of a horizontally differentiated good. To do so, we set up an informed principal problem in a Hotelling model where the buyer's preferences are described in terms of a base consumption value...

A sender chooses ex ante how her information will be disclosed to a privately informed receiver who then takes one of two actions. The sender wishes to maximize the probability that the receiver takes the desired action. The sender faces an ex ante quantity-quality tradeoff: sending positive...

The paper reports results from an Ultimatum Game experiment with asymmetric information where Proposers can send to Responders misleading information about their endowment. We allow for all possible gender combinations in the Proposer-Responder pairs. Proposer messages that underestimate the...

A principal seeks to persuade an agent to accept an offer of uncertain value before a deadline expires. The principal can generate information, but exerts no control over exogenous outside information. The combined effect of the deadline and outside information creates incentives for the...

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 analyze demand function competition with a finite number of agents and private information. We show that the nature of the private information determines the market power of the agents and thus price and volume of equilibrium trade.We establish our results by providing a characterization of...