We study the impact of wait time on consumers' purchasing behavior when product quality is unknown to some consumers (the 'uninformed consumers'), but known to others (the 'informed consumers'). In a capacitated environment, wait times act as a signal of quality for uninformed consumers because,...

An agent samples projects over time, observing quality for each, while aprincipal can select at most one. The principal values quality, whereas the agent onlywants a project chosen. Transfers are unavailable. We determine the optimal mechanismwhen the principal can verify quality by paying a...

Asymmetric information can distort market outcomes. I study how the online disclosure of information affects consumers' behavior and firms' incentives to upgrade product quality in markets where information is traditionally limited. I first build a model of consumer search with firms' endogenous...

I model a firm that invests in both the quality of its product and in providing information to the market. Consumers learn about the quality through both news the firm cannot influence and promotion it controls. This ability to promote creates and enhances incentives for investment. Promotion...

Transparency of quality in the healthcare sector primarily aims to facilitate patients' care decisions, however, it also provides useful information to competing healthcare providers. We study how competitors respond to increased transparency about rivals' quality by exploiting a regulatory...

We build a modified measure of disaggregation quality (MDQ), based on the disaggregation quality (DQ) measure from Chen, Miao, and Shevlin (2015). Like DQ, MDQ is a parsimonious measure of data disaggregation quality in the annual report that can be constructed through the percentage of...

We consider a firm’s choice of service rate in the following environment. The firm may have high or low quality, and sells a good to consumers who are heterogeneously informed. Consumers arrive according to a Poisson process and are serviced in a random period of time. If a consumer arrives...

We explore customer choice behavior when they face a choice between service providers of unknown service value. Customers arrive according to a Poisson process to the market. Service times are exponentially distributed with the same rate at each service provider. Both the service providers are...

We study a firm's incentives to build and maintain reputation for quality, when quality is persistent and can be certified at a cost. We characterize all Markov-perfect equilibria where the firm's choices -i.e., timing of certification and investment– depend only on the firm's reputation. MPE...