Trademarks are indeed about information, but trademark doctrine misunderstands trademarks’ information function. Trademark doctrine takes a broadcast view in a networked world. Rather than a world where a single source transmits messages to a passive public, we live in a world where many...

We study how statutory-law changes relate to disclosure, pricing, and liquidity in the used-car market. Federal odometer laws mandated disclosure of mileage on car titles upon ownership transfer and thereby enhanced enforcement of odometer-fraud prohibitions. Exploiting time variations in state...

I use the Prescott (1975) hotels model to explain variations in price dispersion across goods sold by supermarkets in Chicago. I extend the theory to accounts for the monopoly power of chains and for non-shoppers. The main empirical finding is that the effect of demand uncertainty on price...

The basis of competition in today’s marketplace is changing from one based on human labor, to one where the principle source of value creation is an organization’s knowledge, and the organization’s ability to rapidly acquire new knowledge through learning. The rise of the knowledge economy...

We study identification of preferences in static single-agent discrete choice models where decision makers may be imperfectly informed about the state of the world. We leverage the notion of one-player Bayes Correlated Equilibrium by Bergemann and Morris (2016) to provide a tractable...

This paper empirically studies how social learning among consumers shapes firms' optimal strategies of using advertising to signal product quality. I present an equilibrium model that describes both consumers' and firms' learning and decision-making under quality uncertainty. My model allows me...

I study optimal information provision by a search goods seller. While the seller controls a consumer's pre-search information, which decides whether she will engage in costly search for the product, he cannot control her post-search information because the consumer would inevitably learn the...

Deadlines are common in product development and are often felt to be too harsh - many development efforts are still worth continuing at the time of mandated termination. We examine the value of deadlines from the agency-theoretic perspective. We consider a firm that pays an agent to lead product...