This paper considers a monopolist selling two objects to a single buyer with privately observed valuations. We prove that if each buyer’s type has a non-negative virtual valuation for each object, then the optimal price schedule is such that the objects are sold only in a bundle; weaker...

The interpretation of the loss of utility as transport costs in address models of differentiation poses a methodological difficulty. Transport costs implicitly amounts to assume that there is a good neither included in the differentiated sector nor in the composite (numeraire) good of the...

The goal of this paper is to reexamine the optimal design and efficiency of loyalty rewards in markets for final consumption goods. While the literature has emphasized the role of loyalty rewards as endogenous switching costs (which distort the efficient allocation of consumers), in this paper l...

While the theoretical industrial organization literature has long argued that excess capacity can be used to deter entry into markets, there is little empirical evidence that incumbent firms effectively behave in this way. Bagwell and Ramey (1996) propose a game with a specific sequence of moves...

A buyer with downward sloping demand faces a number of unit supply sellers. The paper characterizes optimal auctions in this setting. For the symmetric case, a uniform auction (with price equal to lowest rejected offer) is optimal when complemented with reserve prices for different quantities...

We extend Aumann's theorem [Aumann 1987], deriving correlated equilibria as a consequence of common priors and common knowledge of rationality, by explicitly allowing for non-rational behavior. We replace the assumption of common knowledge of rationality with a substantially weaker one, joint...

Do the contests with the largest prizes attract the most able contestants? Do contestants avoid competition? In this paper we show that the distribution of abilities plays a crucial role in determining contest choice. Positive sorting exist only when the proportion of high ability contestants is...

We consider the agency problem of a staff member managing microfinancing programs, who can abuse his discretion to embezzle borrowers' repayments. The fact that most borrowers of microfinancing programs are illiterate and live in rural areas where transportation costs are very high make staff's...

Using the assignment of students to schools as our leading example, we study many-to-one two-sided matching markets without transfers. Students are endowed with cardinal preferences and schools with ordinal ones, while preferences of both sides need not be strict. Using the idea of a competitive...

This paper studies a model of announcements by a privately informed government about the future state of the economic activity in an economy subject to recurrent shocks and with distortions due to income taxation. Although transparent communication would ex ante be desirable, we find that even a...