We showed in McLean and Postlewaite (2014) that when agents are informationally small, there exist small modifications to VCG mechanisms in interdependent value problems that restore incentive compatibility. This paper presents a two-stage mechanism that similarly restores incentive...

This paper investigates the effects of estate taxation when firms cannot directly observe worker skill levels. Imperfect labor market signaling gives rise to an information externality that causes workers to free-ride off of others' human capital acquisition. Inherited wealth exacerbates the...

We study third-degree price discrimination in the presence of uninformed buyers who extract noisy information from observing prices. In a noisy learning environment, price discrimination can be detrimental to the firm and beneficial to the consumers. On the one hand, discriminatory pricing...

How should a manager optimally choose transfers to incentivize multiple agents both to collect and to share costly information? To answer this question we study a simple model with a principal and two agents. The agents can obtain costly signals and communicate with each another via...

Riordan and Sappington (JET, 1988) show that in an agency relationship in which the agent's type is correlated with a public ex post signal, the principal may attain first best (full surplus extraction and efficient output levels) if the agent is faced with a lottery such that each type is...

Crowdfunding is a new and popular way of funding innovative products. Despite numerous advantages, there are challenges to this model, chief among them credibly signaling information about product quality to a pool of small, uninformed investors. We explore how an entrepreneur might accomplish...

Two experts make yes/no predictions about whether an event, such as an economic crisis, will occur. They receive private signals about the likelihood of the event that are much more informative than the coarse recommendations they can ultimately convey. The experts may care about both absolute...

We show evidence of a liquidity searching behaviour of informed investors in option listings, which was also found by Collin-Dufresne and Fos (2015) using stock markets. Nevertheless, and differently from Collin-Dufresne and Fos (2015), we find that the option bid-ask spread may be still a good...