How should voters be informed about policymaking? This paper studies optimal information revelation in a model of political accountability. 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 about the shock. We characterize optimal revelation under two regimes: pre-effort revelation, in which signals are released before effort is chosen, and post-effort revelation, in which signals are released afterward. Under pre-effort revelation, either full transparency or complete opacity can be optimal, depending on the relative importance of discipline versus selection. By contrast, post-effort revelation admits conditional censorship that improves political selection by encouraging shirking while simultaneously making such behavior easier to detect. Consequently, post-effort revelation weakly dominates pre-effort revelation in maximizing voter welfare.

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.

We build a model of policymaking under the threat of unrest. A policymaker chooses how much effort to spend on a public good; effort is unobservable and the outcome conditional on effort is uncertain. A group of citizens protest if the outcome falls short of a reference point; the reference point is determined endogenously by rational expectations about the outcome and by the height of emotions. We show that the effects of stronger emotional reactions on policymaker's effort and the probability of protest are nonmonotonic and depend on the group's ability to inflict damage. Equilibrium may require the policymaker to randomize between providing some effort or no effort at all, in order to temper citizens' aspirations, in which case strong emotional reactions are counterproductive. Optimal emotional reactions are fine-tuned to minimize the probability of protest.