This paper revisits recent empirical research on buyer credulity in arts auctions and auctions for assets in general. We show that elementary results in auction theory can fully account for some stylized facts on asset returns that have been held to suggest that sellers of assets can exploit...

This paper proposes an explanation of merger waves based on the interaction between competitive pressure and irreversibility of mergers in an uncertain environment. A set of acquirers compete over time for scarce targets. At each point in time, an acquirer can either postpone a takeover attempt,...

The present paper contributes to the literature on dynamic games with strategic complementarities, in two interrelated ways. First, we identify a class of dynamic complete information games in which intertemporal complementarities and multiple equilibria can be fruitfully analyzed. Second, we...

This paper studies a simple multi-period model of limit pricing under one-sided incomplete information. I characterize pooling and separating equilibria, determine conditions under which the latter exist and study under which conditions on the primitives the equilibria involve limit pricing. The...

This paper considers a model of infectious disease, such as swine flu, in which privately costly treatment confers immunity on recovered individuals. It is shown that under decentralized decision making, infected individuals ignore the externality that their treatment has on susceptible...

This paper studies a model of disease propagation in which agents can control their exposure to infection by engaging in costly preventive behavior. Agents are assumed to be fully rational, strategically sophisticated and forward-looking. I show that on the transition path, optimal behavior is...

This work presents an equilibrium model of diversification through merger formation. Due to moral hazard problems, poorly capitalized firms are credit rationed and may seek to alleviate the incentive problem (and thereby raise external funds) by either merging, employing a monitor or a...

This paper fully characterizes the optimal control of a recurrent infectious disease through the use of (non-vaccine) prevention and treatment. The dynamic system may admit multiple steady states and the optimal policy may be path dependent. We find that an optimal path cannot end at a point...