Blind Disclosure

Aaron Kolb, Marilyn Pease, Daniel W. Sacks and Joshua Quick

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2023, vol. 15, issue 2, 41-79

Abstract: We develop and test a theory of blind disclosure. A sender chooses whether to disclose information based on a preliminary, private signal. In the unique equilibrium, contrary to the literature's canonical unraveling result, senders disclose only if their preliminary signal exceeds a cutoff. This cutoff rule leads to partial unraveling in environments with either risk aversion or moral hazard, and disclosure decreases with uncertainty. Using unique administrative data on disclosed and undisclosed grades in a large university, we find that the model is consistent with student choices during spring 2020 to conceal letter grades by switching to optional pass-fail grades.

JEL-codes: D81 D82 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/mic.20210182 (application/pdf)
https://doi.org/10.3886/E156023V1 (text/html)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/mic.20210182.appx (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/mic.20210182.ds (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:aea:aejmic:v:15:y:2023:i:2:p:41-79

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

DOI: 10.1257/mic.20210182

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Journal: Microeconomics is currently edited by Johannes Hörner

More articles in American Economic Journal: Microeconomics from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().