Oxford Events, the new replacement for OxTalks, will launch on 16th March. The two-week OxTalks freeze period starts on Monday 2nd March. During this time, there will be no facility to publish or edit events. The existing OxTalks site will remain available to view during this period. Once Oxford Events launches, you will need a Halo login to submit events. Full details are available on the Staff Gateway.
We study optimal rating design under moral hazard and strategic manipulation. An intermediary observes a noisy indicator of effort and commits to a rating policy that shapes market beliefs and pay. We characterize optimal ratings via concavification of a gain function. Optimal ratings depends on interaction of effort and risk: for activities that raise tail risk, optimal ratings exhibit lower censorship, pooling poor outcomes to insure and encourage risk-taking; for activities that reduce tail risk, upper censorship increases penalties for negligence. In multi-task environments with window dressing, less informative ratings deter manipulation. In redistributive test design, optimal tests exhibit mid censorship.
