We study a receiver's learning problem of choosing an informative test in a signaling environment. Each test induces a signaling subgame. Thus, in addition to its direct effect on the receiver's information, a test has an indirect effect through the sender's signaling strategy. We show that the...

A sender designs an information structure to persuade a receiver to take an action. The sender is ignorant about the receiver's prior, and evaluates each information structure using the receiver's prior that is the worst for the sender. I characterize the optimal information structures in this...

Firms often discourage certain categories of individuals from buying their products, seemingly at odds with typical assumptions about profit maximization. This paper provides a potential rationale for such firm behavior: Consumers seek to signal that they have "desirable" ideological values to...

To study hiring discrimination against cancer survivors, we conduct a vignette experiment in which American and British recruiters evaluate fictitious job candidates. Candidates differed by periods of non-employment in their career, including non-employment due to suffering from cancer. We study...

The last decade has witnessed an explosion in the number of regional trade agreements (RTAs). There seems to be a general if ill-defined belief on the part of many policy-makers, and among a number of academics as well, that there is more to a RTA than the traditional gains from trade. This...

Technical indicators are widely used by market participants to identify trends in asset prices and in trading volumes. However, it is unclear how to reconcile this approach with a portfolio selection policy that guide investment decisions in many assets at the same time. We bridge the gap...

We study signal-dependent experimentation in the presence of accumulation and show that the passive-learner's action surprisingly coincides with the experimentor's when the unknown term is the one determining the decay rate of the stock, while they differ when the parameter being learned is the...

This paper provides a noncooperative approach to core stability in an economy with incomplete information. The analysis covers general exchange economies, although our tightest results hold when effective coalitions consist of at most two players, as in matching. We study the perfect Bayesian...

We present a novel framework for analyzing the optimal asset and signal combination problem. We reformulate the original problem of portfolio selection from a set of correlated assets and signals into one of selecting from a set of uncorrelated trading strategies through the lens of Canonical...

A firm, privately informed about product quality, chooses a public test. Tests vary in expertise, and return a binary result. A competitive market generates interim beliefs based on expertise and posteriors based on test results. We show that standard single-crossing does not hold. Higher...