This paper shows how competing firms can facilitate tacit collusion by making passive investments in rivals. In general, the incentives of firms to collude depend in a complex way on the whole set of partial cross ownership (PCO) in the industry. We show that when firms are identical, only...

The assumption that decision makers choose actions to maximize their preferences is a central tenet in economics. This assumption is often justied either formally or informally by appealing to evolutionary arguments. In contrast, we show that in almost every game and for almost every family of...

This paper develops a general methodology for characterizing the dynamic evolution of preferences in a wide class of strategic interactions. We give simple conditions characterizing the limiting distribution of preferences in general games, and apply our results to study the evolutionary...

We consider auction environments in which bidders must incur a cost to learn their valuations and study the optimal selling mechanisms in such environments. These mechanisms specify for each period, as a function of the bids in previous periods, which new potential buyers should be asked to bid....

We study the design of profit maximizing single unit auctions under the assumption that the seller needs to incur costs to contact prospective bidders and inform them about the auction. With independent bidders’ types and possibly interdependent valuations, the seller’s problem can be...

This paper considers three firms that engage in an R&D contest to develop a new profitable technology. For a broad range of parameters, the firm that leads the contest (i.e., has the highest probability of success) is better-off licensing or selling its superior interim knowledge to one of the...