Damiano, Ettore () (Department of Economics, University of Toronto) Li, Hao () (Department of Economics, University of Toronto) Suen, Wing () (School of Economics and Finance, University of Hong Kong)
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This paper considers a model of a rating agency with multiple clients, in which each client has a separate market that forms a belief about the quality of the client after the agency issues a rating. When the clients are rated separately (individual rating), the credibility of a good rating in an inflationary equilibrium of the signaling game is limited by the incentive of the agency to exaggerate the quality of the client. In centralized rating, the agency rates all clients together and shares the rating information among all markets. This allows the agency to coordinate the ratings and achieve a higher average level of credibility for its good ratings than in individual rating. In decentralized rating, the ratings are again shared among all markets, but each client is rated by a self-interested rater of the agency with no access to the quality information of other clients. When the underlying qualities of the clients are correlated, decentralized rating leads to a smaller degree of rating inflation and hence a greater level of credibility than in individual rating. Comparing centralized rating with decentralized rating, we find that centralized rating dominates decentralized rating for the agency when the underlying qualities are weakly correlated, but the reverse holds when the qualities are strongly correlated.
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Article provided by Society for Economic Theory in its journal Theoretical Economics.
Volume (Year): 3 (2008) Issue (Month): 3 (September) Pages: 325-365 Download reference. The following formats are available: HTML
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Damiano, Ettore & Li, Hao & Suen, Wing, 2006.
"Credible Ratings,"
Micro Theory Working Papers
damiano-06-01-17-01-56-45, Microeconomics.ca Website, revised 17 Jan 2006.
[Downloadable!]
Ettore Damiano & Hao Li & Wing Suen, 2006.
"Credible Ratings,"
Working Papers
tecipa-219, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
[Downloadable!]
Find related papers by JEL classification: C72 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Game Theory and Bargaining Theory - - - Noncooperative Games D82 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Asymmetric and Private Information
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
William Chan & Li Hao & Wing Suen, 2007.
"A Signaling Theory Of Grade Inflation,"
International Economic Review,
Department of Economics, University of Pennsylvania and Osaka University Institute of Social and Economic Research Association, vol. 48(3), pages 1065-1090, 08.
[Downloadable!] (restricted)
Archishman Chakraborty & Rick Harbaugh, 2004.
"Comparative Cheap Talk,"
Working Papers
2004-08, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, Department of Business Economics and Public Policy.
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