Many transactions in the marketplace rely on hard (or verifiable) information about the underlying value of the intended exchange, typically through certification--- housing, diamonds, bonds being cases in point. What is the class of Pareto efficient certifications for such scenarios? This paper...

We explore the consequences of weakening the notion of incentive compatibility from strategy-proofness to ordinal Bayesian incentive compatibility (OBIC) in the random assignment model. If the common prior of the agents is a uniform prior, then a large class of random mechanisms are OBIC with...

A principal evaluates an agent based on his knowledge of a subject matter, modeled as a binary state, using pass-fail tests. I show that the optimal test takes a "pick the correct answer" form, with at most three options, regardless of how the principal values the agent's information. In the...

We study the object allocation problem and present two new characterizations of ordinal efficiency in terms of supports of random assignments. Our main characterization provides a link between ex-post and ordinal efficiency

A privately informed sender with state-independent preferences communicates with an uninformed receiver about a single-dimensional state. The sender can verifiably reveal the state precisely. She can also communicate via cheap messages when not disclosing the state. I show that unravelling...

Information about the consequences of our consumption choices can be unwelcome, and people sometimes avoid it. We investigate a situation where one person possesses information that is inconvenient for another, and study why and when they decide to transmit that information. We introduce a...

A shift to more sustainable diets is needed to ensure food security and to reduce the pressure on the environment. Yet, many consumers have misconceptions about the environmental impacts of their diets and lack knowledge on how to prepare sustainable meals. This study uses a mixed-methods...

Information about the consequences of our consumption choices can be unwelcome, and people sometimes avoid it. We investigate a situation where one person possesses information that is inconvenient for another, and study why and when they decide to transmit that information. We introduce a...