This paper studies a buyer-seller relationship where "quality" is not contractible but is affected by effort and the seller's privately known innate value. The seller's cost of effort is also private knowledge. Assuming constant outside opportunities, we show that more than two contracts is...

This article investigates signaling and screening roles of wage offers in a single-play matching model with two-sided unobservable characteristics. It generates the following predictions as matching equilibrium outcomes: (i) "good" jobs offer premia if "high-quality" worker population is large;...