We consider a market where privately informed sellers resort to certification to overcome adverse selection. There is uncertainty about the certifier's ability to generate accurate information. The profit of a monopolistic certifier is an inverted U-shaped function of his reputation for...

In a market where sellers solicit certification to overcome asymmetric information, we show that the profit of a monopolistic certifier can be hump-shaped in its reputation for accuracy: a higher accuracy attracts high-quality sellers but sometimes repels low-quality sellers. As a consequence,...

Reputation concerns can discipline agents to take costly effort and generate good outcomes. But what if outcomes are not always observed? We consider a model of reputation with shifting observability, and ask how this affects agents' incentives. We identify a novel and intuitive mechanism by...