This paper considers a model of a rating agency with multiple clients, in which each client has a separate market that forms a belief about the quality of the client after the agency issues a rating. When the clients are rated separately (individual rating), the credibility of a good rating in...

When employers cannot tell whether a school truly has many good students or just gives easy grades, a school has incentives to inflate grades to help its mediocre students, despite concerns about preserving the value of good grades for its good students. We construct a signaling model where...

In markets for entry-level professionals, the insurance motive drives some participants to sign early contracts. The rush to early contracting can be self-fulfilling, as both its effect on expectations about demand-supply balance in the subsequent spot market and the effect on it from changes in...

We present a model in which the media provide voters with information that is tainted by their own preferences, and derive an equilibrium in which media endorsements influence voting behavior. Competition for media endorsement causes political parties to adopt more centrist policies, which...

Though individuals prefer to join groups with high quality peers, there are also advantages from being high up in the pecking order within a group. We show that sorting of agents in this environment results in an overlapping interval structure in the type space. Segregation and mixing coexist in...

Though individuals prefer to join groups with high quality peers, there are advantages to being high up in the pecking order within a group if higher ranked members of a group have greater access to the group's resources. When two organizations try to attract members from a ¯xed population of...

This paper considers a model of a rating agency with multiple clients. Each client has a separate market (end-user of the rating); the only connection among them is that the underlying qualities of the clients are correlated. In the benchmark case of individual rating, the market for each client...

We consider a two-sided, finite-horizon search and matching model with heterogeneous types and complementarity between types. The quality of the pool of potential partners deteriorates as agents who have found mutually agreeable matches exit the market. When search is costless and all agents...

We provide a welfare analysis of the deadline effect in a repeated negotiation game in which costly delay can produce information that improves the quality of the decision. We characterize equilibrium strategies and the evolution of beliefs in continuous time, and study how the length of the...