Who does, and who should initiate costly certification by a third party under asymmetric quality information, the buyer or the seller? Our answer --- the seller --- follows from a non--trivial analysis revealing a clear intuition. Buyer--induced certification acts as an inspection device, whence...

We study the optimal hierarchical structure of an organization under limited commitment. The organization cannot make a long term commitment to wages and output levels, while it can commit to its hierarchical structure. We show that the optimal hierarchical structure is horizontal when it is...

Without a multiplicative interaction between durability and other quality attributes Swan's (1970) independence result is violated, even with constant marginal costs. Subsequent distortions are aligned when the marginal cost of quality does not increase too much with durability.

We study the effectiveness of mediators in situations of conflict. In a game of cheap talk a principal may employ a mediator whose task is to gather information and make non--binding proposals. We show that mediators facilitate information transmission and are helpful if and only if the...

This paper studies a principal-agent relationship in which either the principal or a supervisor can monitor the agent's hidden action by the use of identical monitoring technologies. The author assumes that signals are private information and commitment to monitoring is not possible. He shows...

Strategic delegation to an independent regulator with a pure consumer standard improves dynamic regulation by mitigating ratchet effects associated with short term contracting. A consumer standard alleviates the regulator’s myopic temptation to raise output after learning the firm is...