This paper formalizes the intuition that brands are consumed for image reasons and that advertising creates a brand's image. The key idea is that advertising informs the public of brand names and creates the possibility of conspicuous consumption by rendering brands a signalling device. In a...

This paper studies interim randomization in contracting settings with multi-sided incentive problems. More specifically, we show that in a principal-agent model with auditing the principal mitigates a non-contractibility of auditing by conditioning the contract on a random signal that is...