We consider a market where privately informed sellers resort to certification to overcome adverse selection. There is uncertainty about the certifier's ability to generate accurate information. The profit of a monopolistic certifier is an inverted U-shaped function of his reputation for accuracy: being perceived as more precise allows to attract more good sellers but a high expected precision also deters bad sellers. Since the certifier tries to reach a balanced reputation to attract both types, reputation has a disciplining effect when the certifier is perceived as insufficiently accurate, but gives incentives to decrease precision when he is perceived as "too" accurate. The impact of competition depends on whether sellers "multihome" or "singlehome". Under singlehoming, certifiers compete to attract good sellers, which makes higher reputation more valuable. Multihoming makes higher reputations less desirable because the competitor exerts a negative externality by providing extra information. Therefore, singlehoming attenuates bad reputation effects, while multihoming exacerbates inefficiencies.

We consider a market where privately informed sellers resort to certification to overcome adverse selection. There is uncertainty about the certifier's ability to generate accurate information. The profit of a monopolistic certifier is an inverted U-shaped function of his reputation for accuracy: being perceived as more precise allows to attract more good sellers but a high expected precision also deters bad sellers. Since the certifier tries to reach a balanced reputation to attract both types, reputation has a disciplining effect when the certifier is perceived as insufficiently accurate, but gives incentives to decrease precision when he is perceived as "too" accurate. The impact of competition depends on whether sellers "multihome" or "singlehome". Under singlehoming, certifiers compete to attract good sellers, which makes higher reputation more valuable. Multihoming makes higher reputations less desirable because the competitor exerts a negative externality by providing extra information. Therefore, singlehoming attenuates bad reputation effects, while multihoming exacerbates inefficiencies.

We consider a cash-constrained firm learning on the value of an irreversible project at a privately known speed. Under perfect information, the optimal date of investment may be non-monotonic in the learning speed: better learning increases the value of experimenting further, but also the speed of updating. Under asymmetric information, the firm uses its investment timing to signal confidence in the project and raise cheaper capital from uninformed investors, which may generate timing distortions: investment is hurried when learning is sufficiently fast, and delayed otherwise. The severity of the cash constraint affects the magnitude of the distortion, but not its direction. (JEL D21, D82, D83, D92, G31, G32)

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