Related papers: Certifying Lemons

We consider the disclosure problem of a sender with a large data set of hard evidence who wants to persuade a receiver to take higher actions. Because the receiver will make inferences based on the distribution of the data they see, the…

Social learning, copying other's behavior without actual experience, offers a cost-effective means of knowledge acquisition. However, it raises the fundamental question of which individuals have reliable information: successful individuals…

We study economies where consumers interact independently with many monopolists. When consumer valuations over goods are correlated, correlation can distort the induced distribution of consumer surplus (information rents). We identify which…

We consider a financial market in which traders potentially face restrictions in trading some of the available securities. Traders are heterogeneous with respect to their beliefs and risk profiles, and the market is assumed thin: traders…

In many settings, multiple uninformed agents bargain simultaneously with a single informed agent in each of multiple periods. For example, workers and firms negotiate each year over salaries, and the firm has private information about the…

We study market interactions in which buyers are allowed to credibly reveal partial information about their types to the seller. Previous recent work has studied the special case of one buyer and one good, showing that such communication…

We study how a monopolist's use of consumer data for price discrimination affects welfare. To answer this question, we develop a model of market segmentation subject to residual uncertainty. We fully characterize when data usage…

We study online Bayesian persuasion problems in which an informed sender repeatedly faces a receiver with the goal of influencing their behavior through the provision of payoff-relevant information. Previous works assume that the sender has…

We explore whether ambiguous communication can be beneficial to the sender in a persuasion problem, when the receiver (and possibly the sender) is ambiguity averse. Our analysis highlights the necessity of using a collection of experiments…

In many settings, an effective way of evaluating objects of interest is to collect evaluations from dispersed individuals and to aggregate these evaluations together. Some examples are categorizing online content and evaluating student…

We study the design of effort-maximizing grading schemes between agents with private abilities. Assuming agents derive value from the information their grade reveals about their ability, we find that more informative grading schemes induce…

Trust is often conveyed through delegation, or through recommendation. This makes the trust authorities, who process and publish trust recommendations, into an attractive target for attacks and spoofing. In some recent empiric studies, this…

Data regulations increasingly enable consumers to switch among market segments, making segmentation an endogenous outcome of strategic interaction. We study a model in which consumers choose segments before a monopolist sets…

We study the monopolist's screening problem with a multi-dimensional distribution of consumers and a one-dimensional space of goods. We establish general conditions under which solutions satisfy a structural condition known as nestedness,…

We consider a sender-receiver game with an outside option for the sender. After the cheap talk phase, the receiver makes a proposal to the sender, which the latter can reject. We study situations in which the sender's approval is crucial to…

Motivated by online platforms such as job markets, we study an agent choosing from a list of candidates, each with a hidden quality that determines match value. The agent observes only a noisy ranking of the candidates plus a binary signal…

Selective contests can impair participants' overall welfare in overcompetitive environments, such as school admissions. This paper models the situation as an optimal contest design problem with binary actions, treating effort costs as…

We study markets where firms compete for consumer attention by subsidizing costly product inspection. These subsidies do not change product quality, but they alter the order in which consumers search by lowering inspection costs. We…

We study the consequences of information asymmetries and misaligned incentives in settings with multiple independent agents. We model an interaction between a Sender, who holds vital private information but cannot act, and a Receiver, who…

In this paper we revisit the basic variant of the classical secretary problem. We propose a new approach in which we separate between an agent that evaluates the secretary performance and one that has to make the hiring decision. The…