We consider the effects a public revelation of information (e.g. rating, grade) has on trading in a dynamic signaling model. Competing buyers offer prices to a privately informed seller who can reject them and delay trade. Delay is costly and the seller has no commitment to its duration. The external public information allows for signaling in equilibrium. More interestingly, we characterize the...

Much of the methodological discussion around experiments in economics and other social sciences is framed in terms of the notions of internal and external validity. The standard view is that internal validity and external validity stand in a relationship best described as a trade-off. However, it is also commonly held that internal validity is a prerequisite to external validity. This article a...

This paper examines the welfare effects of the formation of a free-trade area (a set of countries which abolish tariffs among member countries but let individual countries to set external tariffs). If a representative consumer has love-of-variety preferences, the welfare function exhibits supermodularity in external tariffs: when a country is constrained to charge lower tariffs on imports of so...