reduces the incentives to exert effort in R&D activities. Then, drawing on the signaling role of patents highlighted by the …

In Spence's (1973) signaling by education model and in many of its extensions, firms can only infer workers …' productivities. We characterize the trade-offs between signaling by workers and costly information acquisition by firms. Information … workers have low productivity. Our analysis applies also to other signaling problems, e.g. the financial structure of firms …

' later signaling their private information to rivals. Due to signaling, equilibrium prices are distorted, and so while firms …, compared with firms that do not attempt to manipulate rivals' beliefs, signaling firms acquire less precise information. An …