“Buy local” arrangements encourage members of a community or group to patronize one another rather than the external economy. They range from formal mechanisms such as local currencies to informal “I’ll buy from you if you buy from me” arrangements, and are often championed on social...

While competition between firms producing substitutes is well understood, less is known about rivalry between complementors. We study the interaction between firms in markets with one-way essential complements. One good is essential to the use of the other but not vice versa, as arises with an...

We define and examine three minimal market games (sell-all, buy-sell, and double auction) in the laboratory relative to the predictions of theory. These closed exchange economies have some cash to facilitate transactions, and include feedback. The experiment reveals that (1) the competitive...

We define and examine the performance of three minimal strategic market games (sell-all, buy-sell, and double auction) in laboratory relative to the predictions of theory. Unlike open or partial equilibrium settings of most other experiments, these closed exchange economies have limited amounts...

It is not infrequent to see studies of imperfect competition or of industrial organization rest upon questionable foundations such as the hypothesis that inverse market demand is, whenever it is positive, concave or even linear. Assumptions of this sort are not robust (i.e., "additive") in the...

We generalize the War of Attrition model to allow for N + K firms competing for N prizes. Two special cases are of particular interest. First, if firms continue to pay their full costs after dropping out (as in a standard-setting context), each firm's exit time is independent both of K and of...

We present a model of entry and exit with Bayesian learning and price competition. A new product of initially unknown quality is introduced in the market, and purchases of the product yield information on its true quality. We assume that the performance of the new product is publicly observable....

It is suggested here that there are many highly different purposes for the study and application of theories of oligopolistic competition, monopolistic competition, and allied topics. This paper sets the different purposes and questions in context, then makes criticisms and suggestions as to...

In an economy of interacting agents with both idiosyncratic and aggregate shocks, we examine how the structure of private information influences aggregate volatility. The maximal aggregate volatility is attained in a noise free information structure in which the agents confound idiosyncratic and...

We consider an auction environment with interdependent values. Each bidder can learn her payoff type through costly information acquisition. We contrast the socially optimal decision to acquire information with the equilibrium solution in which each agent has to privately bear the cost of...