An Economic Theory of Information Escrows Ian Ayres* and Cait Unkovic** A variety of information escrows – including allegation escrows, suspicion escrows and shared-interest escrows – hold the promise of reducing the first-mover disadvantage that can deter people with socially valuable private information from disclosing that information to others. Information escrows allow people to transmit sensitive information to a trusted intermediary, the escrow agent, who only forwards the information under pre-specified conditions. For example, an allegation escrow for sexual harassment might allow a victim to place a private complaint into escrow with instructions that the complaint will only be lodged with the proper authorities if the escrow agent receives allegations against the same individual by at least one other claimant. We assess the benefits and costs of allegation escrows and discuss how they might be applied to a variety of claims – including sexual harassment, adultery, corporate and public whistle-blowing, and physician reporting of negative drug reactions. We also show how analogous “shared-interest escrows” might be used in workplace dating and adoption contexts to facilitate the discovery of parties’ mutual interest where unintermediated expressions of interest might themselves be harassing. *ian.ayres@yale.edu Townsend Professor, Yale Law School. **cait.unkovic@berkeley.edu Student, Jurisprudence and Social Policy, University of California Berkeley. We are grateful to Bruce Ackerman, Mark Branch, Jeremy Bulow, Barry Nalebuff and William Samuelson for useful comments.