St 08.02.2017 | 16:30 | Micro Theory Research Seminar

David Rodina (Job Talk) “Information Design and Career Concerns”

St 08.02.2017

David Rodina (Job Talk) “Information Design and Career Concerns”

David Rodina

Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, USA


Author: David Rodina

Abstract: This paper studies the interplay between information and incentives in principal- agent relationships with career concerns, that is when the agent wants to be perceived as of high ability. I derive conditions for when more precise information about performance or more uncertainty about the agent’s ability lead to stronger incentives due to career concerns. A key condition for deriving these comparative statics is how effort changes the informativeness of performance signals regarding ability. An indirect, yet tractable representation of information structures enables a full pure strategy equilibrium analysis without ad-hoc restrictions on the set of information structures. Moreover, I show that more sophisticated information revelation technologies that are implicitly ruled out in the literature overturn commonly held assertions regarding information design and career concerns.


Full Text:  “Information Design and Career Concerns”