Asymmetric information is an important source of inefficiency when an asset (such as a firm) is transacted. The two main sources of this asymmetry are the unobserved idiosyncratic characteristics of the asset (such as future profitability) and unobserved idiosyncratic choices (like secret price...

This paper investigates the welfare effects of private investments prior to trade. A seller of a durable good can privately invest on changing its quality. After the investment, she receives a take-it-or-leave-it offer from a buyer. Both the seller and the buyer value more goods of higher...

This paper provides a complete first-order characterization of equilibrium behavior in the general version of the Crawford and Sobel (1982)'s model when the conflict of interest is small. This exercise allows us to deepen our understanding of how a state-dependent bias and a non-uniform...

This paper studies how languages are shaped by the cognitive costs that using them involves. We introduce a new continuous approach to characterize the optimal resolution of the trade-off between the precision of a language and the complexity of the structures it uses, and its dependence on the...

A seller has a fixed number of goods to sell by a deadline. At each time, he posts a regular price and decides whether to hold a flash sale. Over time, buyers privately enter the market and strategically time their purchases. If a buyer does not purchase when she arrives, she can pay an...

The paper investigates stochastic private investment prior to trade. We study the incentives of a seller of an asset who can undertake risky investments to change its quality, which is not observable by potential buyers. We find that, even when investing is not efficient, the seller undertakes...

We study the role of dropout risk in dynamic signaling. A seller privately knows the quality of an indivisible good and decides when to trade. In each period, he may draw a dropout shock that forces him to trade immediately. To avoid costly delay, the seller with a low-quality good voluntarily...

Most of the large firms organization schemes consist in hierarchical structures of tiers with different wage levels. Traditionally the existence of this kind of organizations has been associated to the separation of productive and managerial or supervision tasks and to differences in the skills...

This paper analyses the relation between parents earnings and their childrens education. In a context of perfect altruism, the model describes parents decisions on how much to consume and how much to invest in their childrens education. The model predicts that returns on education in terms of...

We present a dynamic signaling model where wasteful education takes place over several periods of time. Workers pay an education cost per unit of time and cannot commit to a fixed education length. Workers face an exogenous dropout risk before graduation. Since low-productivity workers' cost is...