Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer --- the seller --- follows from a non--trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer--induced certification acts as an inspection device, whence...

In many long-term relationships, parties may be reluctant to reveal their private information in order to benefit from their informational advantage in the future. We point out that the strategic use of debt by an uninformed party induces another party to reveal private information. Our...

We consider a setting in which insiders have information about income that outside shareholders do not, but property rights ensure that outside shareholders can enforce a fair payout. To avoid intervention, insiders report income consistent with outsiders' expectations based on publicly...

We model a situation where the entrepreneur has an informational advantage during the early stages of an investment project while the venture capitalist has the informational advantage during the later stages. We examine how this evolution of informational asymmetry affects venture investment...

Financial constraints are an important impediment to the growth of small businesses. We study theoretically and empirically how the financial constraints of agents affect their decisions to exert effort, and, hence the organizational decisions and growth of principals, in the context of...

In many security markets, dealers trade with their regular clients at a discount relative to prevailing bid and ask quotes. In this article we provide an explanation to this phenomenon. We consider a dealer and an investor engaged in a long-term relationship. The dealer assigns a reputational...

In a market environment with random detection of product quality, a firm can employ umbrella branding as a strategy to convince consumers of the high quality of its products. Alternatively, a firm can rely on external certification of the quality of one or both of its products. We characterize...

This Paper analyses the effect of a possible takeover on information flows and on the terms of trade in business relationships. We consider a long-term relationship between a firm and a privately-informed stakeholder, a buyer for example. In our model, takeovers both increase the surplus from...