This research analyzes a firm's investment in advertising that signals quality when consumers learn about quality not only from such advertising but also from interactions with other consumers in the form of observational learning or word of mouth. Further, word of mouth interactions may involve...

We develop screening models of final offer arbitration (FOA) in which the uninformed party makes a demand to the informed party. We consider models in which settlement occurs before and after the submission of binding offers, and in each we analyze costly discovery. Our results are compared to...

Economic theory suggests that occupational licensing can be a barrier to entry that restricts labor supply (Friedman, 1962; Stigler, 1971) or a signal of quality that enhances the labor market (Leland, 1979). This paper studies two types of licenses for one occupation – dental assistant (DA) –...

What role do elections play in nondemocracies? In this paper, we offer an empirical test of a popular idea that authoritarian governments use elections to engineer overwhelming victories thus deterring potential opposition from challenging the regime. Using the data from the Russian...

Using a novel measure of own-investor secrecy, we find that non-disclosure to investors, unlike non-disclosure to public, does not signal hedge fund skill. Own-investor secretive funds do not significantly outperform transparent funds through an up market, and they significantly underperform...

We analyze the effects of team gender diversity on initial coin offering (ICO) success measured by the total funding amount raised in the actual ICO and the long-term survival of the project. Using a database featuring 875 initial coin offerings between 2017 and 2019, we find that team gender...

This paper studies screening competition under flexible information acquisition and its interaction with price competition. Multiple homogeneous buyers play a game where they simultaneously design independent exams with pre-specified information limit on a binary-type seller. Once observing own...

This article investigates how a privately-informed seller could signal her type by gathering information about the buyer's match value. We study two alternative ways to obtain information. In the first one, labeled information acquisition, the seller can acquire exogenous signals by facing a...

I propose a new measure of investor disagreement based on trading signals identified from the return-predicting anomaly literature. Disagreement significantly explains the next period trading volume over and above the factors identified in earlier literature. A move from 25th to 75th...