Espinosa, Francisco. <br/><br/>
Noisy Agents / 
Francisco Espinosa, Debraj Ray. 
 - Cambridge, Mass.  National Bureau of Economic Research  2018. 
 - 1 online resource:  illustrations (black and white); 
 - NBER working paper series  no. w24627 .
 - Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research)  no. w24627. .
<br/><br/> May 2018. 
<br/><br/> Agents signal their type in a principal-agent model; the principal seeks to retain good agents. Types are signaled with some ambient noise. Agents can choose to add or remove additional noise at a cost. It is shown that monotone retention strategies, in which the principal keeps the agent if the signal crosses some threshold, are generically never equilibria. The main result identifies an equilibrium with a bounded retention zone, in which the principal is wary of both excessively good and excessively bad signals: she retains the agent if the signal is "moderate" and replaces him otherwise. The equilibria we uncover are robust to various extensions: non-normal signal structures, non-binary types, interacting agents, costly mean-shifting, or dynamics with term limits. We discuss applications to risky portfolio management, fake news and noisy government statistics. 
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