This paper examines one of the most important marketing strategies by software producers on the Internet. That is whether to offer free samples and if so, whether to list the samples on shareware repositories. I show that firms with higher value products have a greater incentive to offer free...

We consider the impact of history on the survival of a monopolist selling single units in discrete time periods, whose quality is learned slowly. If the seller learns her own quality at the same rate as customers, a sufficiently bad run of luck could induce her to stop selling. When she knows...

We study the impact of reputational incentives in markets characterized by moral hazard problems. Social preferences have been shown to enhance contract enforcement in these markets, while at the same time generating considerable wage and price rigidity. Reputation powerfully amplifies the...

We study the effects of preselection on an expert's incentive to give truthful advice. In a decision environment in which certain decisions yield more precise estimates about the expert's expertise, a mediocre expert's advice is biased. We show that this bias can be undone by the introduction of...

We examine a simple extension to existing credit contacts for the poor (‘microfinance contracts’), that would allow financial institutions to provide repayment insurance to their clients. The proposed contract uses the repeated nature of loans to build credit records that borrowers in good...

The strong adverse selection that immigrants face in hosting labour markets may induce them to adopt some behaviours or signals to modify employers' beliefs. Relevant mechanisms for reaching this purpose are personal reputation; exploiting ethnic networks deeply-rooted in the hosting country;...

Consider team production with two people. Each is characterized by a prior distribution that he will do Right or Wrong. After the outcome of the project is observed, these probabilities are updated. When output depends on the weakest link in production, following project failure the posterior...

When grades lose their informative value because the percentage of students receiving the best grade rises without any corresponding increase in ability, this is called grade inflation. Conventional wisdom says that such grade inflation is unavoidable since it is essentially costless to award...

When hiring an adviser (he), a policy maker (she) often faces the problem that she has incomplete information about his preferences. Some advisers are good, in the sense that their preferences are closely aligned to the policy maker's preferences, and some advisers are bad. Recently, some...

In models of sequential decision making herd behaviour occurs if the signals smart (dumb) agents receive are (un)correlated and if agents have reputational concerns. We show that introducing costly effort to become informed about project payoffs (i) eliminates herd behaviour and (ii) shifts...