| My thesis explores three topics in which the interaction of dynamics and information play a key role: commitment, reputation and the transmission of information through prices.; In the first chapter I investigate a new path to the modeling of commitment. Commitment is typically studied by giving one of the players the opportunity to take an initial binding action. This approach has the drawback that the fundamental question of who has the opportunity to commit is driven by a modeling decision. I construct a dynamic model in which players are given the opportunity to change their minds as often as they want, but pay a switching cost if they do so. In this framework commitment power arises naturally from the fundamentals of the model. Applications to an entry-deterrence situation and a bargaining setting are then presented.; My second chapter studies the consequences of managers' reputational concerns for the optimal design of their compensation schemes. As future salaries depend on the manager's perceived ability, she has incentives to distort today's decision to influence that perception. On the one hand, I verify that the perverse incentives of career concerns are robust to the introduction of contingent contracting. On the other, I characterize the impact of contingent contracting on different equilibrium outcomes. I find that while managerial compensation is monotonically increasing in profits late in a career, this is not the case early on. I relate the implications of these results to the literature on the link between pay and performance.; When agents take decisions under uncertainty in dynamic settings, they have the opportunity to update their behavior as new information arrives. Using a new data set from multi-unit descending Internet auctions, I examine in the third chapter the extent to which agents incorporate such information and provide estimates of the importance of informational frenzies (moments when many buyers offer to buy at the same price) and crashes (moments when it becomes common knowledge that no buyer would buy at the current price). |
