This paper shows how a firm can use non-targeted advertising to exploit consumers' desire for social status. A monopolist sells multiple varieties of a good to consumers who each care about what others believe about his wealth. Advertising allows consumers both to buy different varieties and to recognize them when others buy. In equilibrium, the firm advertises each variety to those who will buy but also to all poorer consumers who will not, so that they understand what having the goods signals. If concern for status is sufficiently high, then the firm will only place a single variety on the market.

Policymakers often motivate their decisions by disclosing information. While this can help hold the government to account, it may also give incumbents an incentive to "…x the evidence" around their preferred policy. This paper studies how di¤erent disclosure rules and the degree of independence of government agencies a¤ect citizen welfare when manipulation incentives are present. When both instruments can be chosen to maximize citizen welfare, secrecy is never socially optimal because its chief advantage-unbiased information-can more e¢ ciently be achieved by insulating the agency from political pressure. And yet granting independence to the agency is not necessarily in the citizens'interest. For given evidence, in fact, biased information makes the government more reluctant to implement its ex ante preferred policy, thus mitigating the agency con ‡ict between the government and the public. The model therefore provides a novel rationale for the optimality of nonindependent agencies.

This paper look at selfish types and conditional cooperators working together in teams. Players knows that lay-offs will occur at a fixed future date, which creates incentives similar to those in a finitely repeated prisoners' dilemma.The results show that the equilibrium with the most cooperation tends to be a sorting equilibrium, where players reveal their types so that conditional cooperators can identify and cooperate with one another. Changes in parameter values that in most situations would make cooperation more attractive, such as an increase in the discount factor, the fraction of conditional cooperators or the pay-off to reciprocated cooperation, can actually reduce equilibrium cooperation if they decrease an egoist's incentive to sort.

This paper examines how a firm can strategically use sellouts to influence consumers’ beliefs about its product’s popularity. A monopolist faces a market of conformist consumers, whose willingness to pay is increasing in their beliefs about aggregate demand. Consumers are broadly rational but have limited strategic reasoning about the firm’s incentives. Formally, I apply the concept of a ‘cursed equilibrium’, where consumers neglect how the firm’s chosen actions might be correlated with its private information about demand. I show that in a dynamic setting, the firm may choose its price and capacity so as to generate sellouts, specifically to exploit consumers’ limited reasoning. It does so to effectively conceal unfavorable information from consumers about past demand in a way that increases future profits. Sellouts tend to occur when demand is low, rather than high, and may be accompanied by introductory pricing. The analysis also demonstrates that the firm’s ability to mislead some consumers always benefits certain others, and can result in higher overall consumer surplus.