We examine an analyst with career concerns making cheap talk recommendations to a sequence of traders, each of whom possesses private information concerning the analyst's ability. The recommendations of the analyst influence asset prices that are then used to evaluate the analyst. An endogeneity problem thus arises. In particular, if the reputation of the analyst is sufficiently high then an incompetent but strategic analyst is able to momentarily hide her type. An equilibrium in which the market eventually learns the analyst type always exists. However, under some conditions, an equilibrium also exists in which the incompetent analyst is able to hide her type forever.

How does the incentive to engage in social signaling depend on the composition of peers? We find that an increase in the mean peer quality may either strengthen signaling incentives (keeping up with the Joneses) or weaken them (small fish in a big pond). Both right and left truncations of the distribution of peer quality reduce signaling incentives, while more dispersed peer distributions strengthen them. Finally, more right skewed peer distributions strengthen signaling incentives when only a small fraction of the group engage in signaling, but weaken them when signaling is widespread. JEL Codes: D82

© The Author(s) 2019. We consider how the outcome of bargaining varies with changes in the trade-off between equality, efficiency, and total-earnings maximization.We observe that subjects avoid an equal-earning outcome if it is Pareto inefficient; a large proportion of bargaining pairs avoids an equal and Pareto efficient outcome in favor of one giving unequal and total-earnings maximizing payoffs, and this proportion increases when unequal outcomes imply larger earnings to one of the players, even though this also implies higher inequality; finally, we document a compromise effect that violates the independence of irrelevant alternatives condition. (JEL: C70, C72, C92)

This paper extends the DeMarzo and Duffie (1999) signaling model from single sales to portfolio sales. It shows that the extended model can account for retention of low quality assets and help explain why retained assets may be of varying quality.

© 2019 Royal Economic Society. Published by Oxford University Press. We study a model that integrates productive and socialising efforts with occupational choice, and endogenous spillovers. We show that more talented individuals work harder and contribute more to externalities, but also have incentives to segregate. Average socialising increases the productivity of the occupation. The size of an occupation grows with its synergies. Individuals underinvest in productive and socialising effort, and sort themselves inefficiently into occupations. We derive the optimal subsidy for sorting into different occupations. Finally, we derive a rule to identify overpopulated sectors and establish the connection between inequality of talents, socialising, productive efforts and occupation size.