Online matching platforms that lack common informational mechanisms such as ratings and reviews often resort to mandatory verification of their users to enhance credibility. However, such mandatory verification may suppress the transmission of useful information for individual users. This study...

This paper explores students' expectations about the returns to completing higher education and provides first evidence on perceived signaling and human capital effects. We elicit counterfactual labor market expectations for the hypothetical scenarios of leaving university with or without a...

We study a multi-player model of sequential communication. A receiver obtains information from two sources. The first is cheap talk with a sender, who acquires the information, while the second is Bayesian persuasion with a mediator, who modifies the initial information. We prove that Bayesian...

We study the monotonicity of sender's equilibrium strategy with respect to her type in signalling games. We use counterexamples to show that when the sender's payoff is non-separable, the Spence-Mirrlees condition cannot rule out equilibria in which the sender uses non-monotone strategies. These...

Information plays a key role in markets with consumer choice. In education, data on schools is often gathered through standardized testing. However, the use of these tests has been controversial because of distortions in the metric itself. We study the Chilean educational market and document...

Among intellectual property (IP) doctrines, only utility patents should protect function. Utility patents offer strong rights that place constraints on competition, but they only arise when inventors can demonstrate substantial novelty after a costly examination. Copyrights, trademarks, and...

Crowdfunding campaigns must display authenticity in order to gain potential backers' trust, yet racial minorities may face bias if they include signals of their racial identity in their pages. There are numerous ways that racial identity can be signaled on crowdfunding platforms, and this work...

Online service marketplace consumers face more quality uncertainty due to the intangibility, variability, and unreturnable nature of the services sought, which potentially leads to the “lemons” problem (Akerlof 1970). To alleviate this problem, the platform employs refund options as quality...

Despite the popular use of product sampling as a promotional strategy by retailers, existing research has largely focused on offline sampling of physical goods and online sampling of information goods but overlooked online sampling of physical goods. We argue that, in the context of online...

Margin capacity, defined as the aggregate excess debt capacity of investors buying securities on margin, strongly predicts (a) lower S&P 500 returns, (b) lower growth in aggregate earnings, dividends, employment, and overall economic activity, (c) higher macro, financial, and policy uncertainty,...