This paper examines the interplay between career concerns and market structure. Ability and effort are complements: effort increases the probability that a skilled agent achieves a one-time breakthrough. Wages are based on assessed ability and on expected output. Effort levels at different times...

``Big data" gives markets access to previously unmeasured characteristics of individual agents. Policymakers must decide whether and how to regulate the use of this data. We study how new data affects incentives for agents to exert effort in settings such as the labor market, where an agent's...

In this paper, I study the dynamic delegation problem in a principal-agent model wherein an agent privately observes a persistently evolving state, and the principal commits to actions based on the agent's reported state. There are no transfers. While the agent has state-independent preferences,...

We study a receiver's learning problem of choosing an informative test in a signaling environment. Each test induces a signaling subgame. Thus, in addition to its direct effect on the receiver's information, a test has an indirect effect through the sender's signaling strategy. We show that the...

We study the delegation problem between a principal and an agent, who not only has better information about the performance of the available actions but also superior awareness of the set of actions that are actually feasible. We provide conditions under which the agent finds it optimal to leave...

We study the interaction of incentives to free-ride on information acquisition and strategically delay irreversible investment in environments in which multiple firms evaluate an investment opportunity. In our model, two firms decide how quickly to privately obtain information about the...

We consider a Bayesian persuasion problem where a sender's utility depends only on the expected state. We show that upper censorship that pools the states above a cutoff and reveals the states below the cutoff is optimal for all prior distributions of the state if and only if the sender's...

We study dynamic signaling in a game of stochastic stakes. Each period, a privately informed agent of binary type chooses whether to continue receiving a return that is an increasing function of both her reputation and an exogenous public stakes variable or to irreversibly exit the game. A...

A standing question in the theory of matching markets is how to define stability under incomplete information. This paper proposes an epistemic approach. Agents negotiate through offers, and offers are interpreted according to the highest possible degree of rationality that can be ascribed to...

The founder of a start-up (principal) who has a project with uncertain returns must retain and incentivize an agent using promise of future payments and information gathering. The agent's effort incrementally advances production and such advance is a prerequisite for gathering new information....