When employers cannot tell whether a school truly has many good students or just gives easy grades, schools have an incentive to inflate grades to help mediocre students, despite concerns about preserving the value of good grades for good students. We construct a signaling model where grades are...

Committees improve decisions by pooling independent information of members, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private evidence when members have conflicting preferences. We study how self-interest mediates these conflicting forces. When members' preferences differ, no...

The decomposition of wage residuals into standard deviation and percentile ranks can be misleading because the two measures are not necessarily independent. With rising wage inequality, the mean percentile rank of low-wage groups will rise simply because more dispersed distributions have thicker...

We present a dynamic model of sequential information acquisition by a heterogeneous committee. At each date agents decide whether to vote to adopt one of two alternatives or continue to collect more information. The process stops when a qualified majority vote for an alternative. Three main...

The rationing of public housing reduces the efficiency of the match between public housing units and their occupants, as competing users cannot effectively convey their preferences through a price mechanism. This study investigates the costs of public housing from the perspective of the...

Costly delay in negotiations can induce the negotiating parties to be more forthcoming with their information and improve the quality of the collective decision. Imposing a deadline may result in stalling, in which players at some point stop making concessions but switch back to conceding at the...

Using viewer share and rating points for the Toronto|Hamilton television market, we estimate the demand for U.S. programs retransmitted in Canada and test several hypotheses on the effect of domestic content regulation, program type, simulcasting regulations, network affiliation, and other...

Two organizations compete for high quality agents from a fixed population of heterogeneous qualities by designing how to distribute their resources among members according to their quality ranking. The peer effect induces both organizations to spend the bulk of their resources on higher ranks in...

We consider a two-sided, finite-horizon search and matching model with heterogeneous types and complementarity between types. The quality of the pool of potential partners deteriorates as agents who have found mutually agreeable matches exit the market. When search is costless and all agents...