A seller wishes to prevent the discovery of rival offers by its prospective customers.  We study sales techniques which serve this purpose by making it harder for a customer to return to buy later after a search for alternatives.  These include making an exploding offer, offering a "buy-now"...

A common sales tactic is for a seller to encourage a potential customer to make her purchase decision quickly, before she can investigate rival deals in the market.  We consider a market with sequential consumer search in which firms can achieve this either by making an exploding offer (which...

This paper surveys models of markets in which some consumers are "savvy" while others are not.  We discuss when the presence of savvy consumers improves the deals available to non-savvy consumers in the market (the case of search externalities), and when the non-savvy fund generous deals for...

It is often suggested that incentive schemes under moral hazard can be gamed by an agent with superior knowledge of the environment, and that deliberate lack of transparency about the incentive scheme can reduce gaming.  We formally investigate these arguments.  Ambiguous incentive schemes...

We study the effect of hyperbolic discounting on competitive equilibria in secondary markets for a durable good. Under exponential discounting, secondary markets are irrelevant in our model. They do not affect the price in the initial period and are neutral to the allocation. Under hyperbolic...