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 induces 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 are exactly offset by losses for captive consumers.

This paper asks how an oversight institution should reveal information when elections both discipline incumbents and select future officeholders. In a two-period political agency model, an incumbent privately observes a policy shock, chooses costly effort, and is judged from the policy outcome and a public signal about the shock. Timing is central. If the signal is observed before effort, optimal revelation is polar: full revelation when discipline is valuable, and no revelation when selection is valuable. If the signal is observed after effort, partial revelation can strictly dominate both extremes. The designer sometimes withholds information, which weakens effort incentives, but clear signals remain likely enough to expose shirking. Delayed revelation therefore weakly dominates ex ante revelation and strictly improves welfare when selection concerns are sufficiently strong. The result identifies retrospective oversight as a distinct institutional tool, not merely delayed revelation.

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 expectations about the outcome and by the intensity 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’ expectations, in which case strong emotional reactions are counterproductive. Optimal emotional reactions are fine-tuned to minimize the probability of protest.

Can a more competent government produce worse policy outcomes? We study a dynamic two-party model in which an office-motivated opposition can sabotage reform implementation. Competence improves the incumbent's policy choice, but it also makes successful reform more electorally threatening to the opposition. The result is a competence curse: competent incumbents face more sabotage than incompetent ones. When reform is usually desirable and sabotage is costly, incompetence can raise welfare by weakening the opposition's incentive to destroy reform. When reform is rarely desirable, competence dominates because policy mistakes are more costly than sabotage. With intermediate information, welfare can be maximized by a moderately competent government. When voters choose retention rules, welfare improves when elections either insulate incumbents from short-run performance shocks or punish observed sabotage directly.