I study an auction format called penny auctions. In these auctions, every bid increases the price by a small amount, but it is costly to place a bid. The auction ends if more than some predetermined amount of time has passed since the last bid. Outcomes of real penny auctions are surprising:...

I study a repeated mechanism design problem where a revenue-maximizing monopolist sells a fixed number of service slots to randomly arriving buyers with private values and increasing exit rates. In addition to characterizing the fully optimal mechanism, I study the optimal mechanisms in two...

This note introduces and discusses the concept of pu-dominance in the context of finite games in normal form. It then presents the pu-dominance criterion for equi- librium selection. The pu-dominance criterion is inspired by and closely related to the p-dominance criterion (Morris et al., 1995)...

We present an endogenous timing game of action commitment in which play- ers can steal from each other parts of a homogeneous and perfectly divisible pie and the expected effectiveness of a player?s theft is proportional to the amount he currently owns. We show how the incentives to preempt or...

We study the relative performance of disclosure and auditing in organizations. We consider the information transmission problem between two decision makers who take actions at dates 1 and 2 respectively. The first decision maker has private information about a state of nature that is relevant...

A common assumption in Political Science literature is policy commitment: candidates maintain their electoral promises. We drop such assumption and we show that costless electoral campaign can be an effective way of transmitting information to voters. The result is robust to relevant equilibrium...

Language is arguably a powerful coordination device in real-life interactions. We here develop a game-theoretic model of two-sided pre-play communication that generalizes the cheap-talk approach by way of introducing a meaning correspondence between messages and actions, and postulating two...

This paper studies the provision of a public good between two agents under lack of commitment and applies it to the problem of children's consumption in separated couples, where children are considered to be public goods. The custodial mother controls the child's consumption, whereas the father...

How is cooperation without immediate reciprocity sustained in a long term relationship? We study the case of two players in continuous time who have privately observable opportunities to provide favors, and where the arrival of these opportunities is a Poisson process. Favors provided by a...

We study strategic information transmission in an organization consisting of an infinite sequence of individual decision makers. Each decision maker chooses an action and receives an informative but imperfect signal of the once-and-for-all realization of an unobserved state. The state affects...