Essays in information economics, with applications to insurance and labor markets.

Summary This paper studies the dynamics of competition in contracts with incomplete information and learning. In the first part, we show that it is beneficial not to impose the transmission of information on claims and past contract choices of policyholders when they change companies. We show that it is desirable to create information asymmetries in an insurance market. Equilibrium contracts are not necessarily actuarial, and contract menus can appear despite the initial information symmetry. The second part shows that credit and insurance contracts are complementary and establishes the robustness of the previous results. It is also shown that long-term contracts have a value beyond that of the commitment, and that the inability to commit to not renegotiating contracts is beneficial. The third part is a contribution to the study of wage formation. It shows the non-robustness of the result of downward real wage rigidity: if performance is not perfectly observable from the outside or if employers commit themselves via their reputation or implement transfers between different cohorts of employees, then real wages are downwardly flexible. This result corroborates empirical studies and shows that these should not lead to the rejection of the presence of commitment in labor contracts. It also leads to positive profits under the assumption of perfect competition.