Does greater political transparency necessarily enhance accountability? This paper studies a political agency model with both moral hazard and adverse selection and shows that the welfare effect of information disclosure can be non-monotonic. In the model, an incumbent observes a stochastic policy shock and chooses whether to exert costly effort, while a voter decides on reelection based on policy outcomes and a public signal. We characterize optimal disclosure of policy shocks under two settings: when signals are revealed before policy effort (pre-policy disclosure) and when they are revealed after implementation (post-policy disclosure). Under pre-policy disclosure, only polar regimes—full transparency or complete opacity—can be optimal, depending on whether voters place greater value on discipline or selection. By contrast, post-policy disclosure admits partial revelation that strictly outperforms opacity: counterintuitively, it encourages shirking by strategic incumbents, yet simultaneously makes such behavior more easily detectable. As a result, post-policy disclosure weakly dominates pre-policy disclosure in maximizing voter welfare. This finding provides a theoretical rationale for probabilistic monitoring, e.g., randomized audits of municipal governments in Brazil.

How do sellers compete when they face uncertainty about rivals’ costs and consumers have limited price information? We address this question in an oligopoly model that embeds cost uncertainty into the framework of Burdett and Judd (1983). Equilibrium prices respond heterogeneously to consumer information: when captive consumers become more informed, all sellers lower prices; when non-captive consumers become more informed, low-cost sellers cut prices while high-cost sellers raise prices. With endogenous information acquisition through consumer search, seller entry has no effect if search frictions are high, but it leads to price divergence when search costs are low. Greater information, whether exogenous or search-driven, improves efficiency overall, though it may harm captive consumers. Under third-degree price discrimination, aggregate consumer surplus remains unchanged relative to uniform pricing, with gains for informed consumers exactly offset by losses for captive consumers.