Governments often support private credit through guarantee schemes, which compen-sate private lenders in the event of borrower default. A key feature of such schemes isthat they rely on private banks to allocate guarantees among borrowers. Yet the role ofbanks in carrying out this allocation – and thus in shaping the effects of guarantees – isnot well understood. We study this role in an economy where...

We study the joint determination of product quality and complexity in a rational setting. We introduce a novel notion of complexity, which affects how difficult it is for an agent to acquire information about product quality. In our model, an agent can accept or reject a product proposed by a designer, who can affect the quality and the complexity of the product. Examples include banks...