In an assignment market with uncertainty regarding productive ability of participants, early contracting can occur as participants balance risk sharing and sorting efficiency. More promising agents may contract early with each other because insurance gains outweigh sorting inefficiency, whereas less promising agents wait. It can also happen in equilibrium that more promising job applicants contract early with less promising firms. Such worker‐driven equilibria may arise when applicants are more risk‐averse, have greater uncertainty regarding their quality, or face a tighter market and when production exhibits increasing returns to firms’ qualities. Early contracting then unambiguously hurts the more promising firms that choose to wait.

Productive consumption adds to utility and income at the same time. The shadow price of a productive good is equal to its money price less its marginal product. As more of the good is consumed, its shadow price rises because of diminishing productivity, and the consumer's full income also rises because the marginal product is positive. This paper uses a simple method to derive the comparative statics of the demand system when shadow prices and full income are endogenous. The direction of the overall bias induced by endogenous prices and income is found to be determinate. We demonstrate that the demand for productive goods tends to be relatively unresponsive to exogenous changes in prices and income. We also show that labor supply will be relatively unresponsive to wage and unearned income if market work causes fatigue.

Committees improve decisions by pooling members' independent information, but promote manipulation, obfuscation, and exaggeration of private information when members have conflicting preferences. Committee decision procedures transform continuous data into ordered ranks through voting. This coarsens the transmission of information, but controls strategic manipulations and allows some degree of information sharing. Each member becomes more cautious in casting the crucial vote than when he alone makes the decision based on own information. Increased quality of one member's information results in his casting the crucial vote more often. Committees make better decisions for members than does delegation. (JEL D71, D82, C72)

This paper provides a general analysis of signaling under double‐crossing preferences with a continuum of types. There are natural economic environments where the indifference curves of two types cross twice, such that the celebrated single‐crossing property fails to hold. Equilibrium exhibits a threshold type below which types choose actions that are fully revealing and above which they pool in a pairwise fashion, with a gap separating the actions chosen by these two sets of types. The resulting signaling action is quasi‐concave in type. We also provide an algorithm to establish equilibrium existence by construction.