Knowledge that Transforms

We study reputation formation where a long‐run player repeatedly observes private signals and takes actions. Short‐run players observe the long‐run player's past actions but not her past signals. The long‐run player can thus develop a reputation for playing a distribution over actions, but not necessarily for playing a particular mapping from signals to actions. Nonetheless, we show that the long‐run player can secure her Stackelberg payoff if distinct commitment types are statistically distinguishable and the Stackelberg strategy is confound‐defeating . This property holds if and only if the Stackelberg strategy is the unique solution to an optimal transport problem. If the long‐run player's payoff is supermodular in one‐dimensional signals and actions, she secures the Stackelberg payoff if and only if the Stackelberg strategy is monotone. Applications include deterrence, delegation, signaling, and persuasion. Our results extend to the case where distinct commitment types may be indistinguishable, but the Stackelberg type is salient under the prior.

Transparency versus opacity is an important dimension of college admission policy. Colleges may gain useful information from a holistic review of applicants' materials, but in doing so may contribute to uncertainty that discourages potential applicants with poor information. This paper investigates the impacts of admissions transparency in the context of Texas' Top Ten Percent Plan, using survey and administrative data from Texas and a model of college applications, admissions, enrollment, grades, and persistence. I estimate that two thirds of the plan's 9.1 point impact on top‐decile students' probability of attending a flagship university was due to information rather than mechanical effects. Students induced to enroll are more likely to come from low‐income high schools, and academically outperform the students that they displace. These effects would be larger if complemented by financial‐aid information, and are driven by transparency, not misalignment between the rules used for automatic and discretionary admissions.