Mechanisms used to derive optimal allocations are typically designed assuming agents fully know their own preferences. It is often impossible to duplicate optimal allocations when agents imperfectly observe object characteristics. I present a crowdsourcing mechanism to approximate optimal allocations under imperfect observations. To ensure truthtelling, agents are punished when their reports differ from the “wisdom of the crowd.” Under mild conditions, this crowdsourcing-with-punishment mechanism replicates the full-information optimal allocation with probability exponentially converging to one in the market size, with small waste. No alternative mechanism meaningfully does better. The proposed mechanism can be applied in many settings, including matching markets.

The discourse around pay transparency has focused on partial equilibrium effects: how workers rectify pay inequities through informed renegotiation. We investigate how employers respond in equilibrium. We study a model of bargaining under two‐sided incomplete information. Our model predicts that transparency reduces the individual bargaining power of workers, leading to lower average wages. A key insight is that employers credibly refuse to pay high wages to any one worker to avoid costly renegotiations with others. When workers have low individual bargaining power, pay transparency has a muted effect. We test our model with an event‐study analysis of U.S. state‐level laws protecting the right of private sector workers to communicate salary information with their coworkers. Consistent with our theoretical predictions, transparency laws empirically lead wages to decline by approximately 2%, and wage declines are smallest in magnitude when workers have low individual bargaining power.

Equal pay laws increasingly require that workers with different group identities doing “similar” work are paid equal wages within firm. We study such “equal pay for similar work” (EPSW) policies theoretically and test our models’ predictions empirically using evidence from a 2009 gender-based Chilean EPSW. Under EPSW, firms segregate their workforce by gender. When there are more men than women in a labor market, EPSW increases the gender wage gap.

We consider sequential search by an agent who cannot observe the quality of goods but can acquire information from a profit-maximizing principal with limited commitment power. The principal can charge higher prices for more informative signals, but high future prices discourage continued search, thereby reducing the principal?s profits. A unique stationary equilibrium outcome exists: the principal (i) sells the agent only partial information, (ii) induces the socially efficient stopping rule, and (iii) extracts the full surplus. However, introducing an additional, free source of information can lead to inefficiency in equilibrium.