Sellers benefit on average from revealing information about their goods to buyers, but the incentive to exaggerate undermines the credibility of seller statements. When multiple goods are being auctioned, we show that ordinal cheap talk, which reveals a complete or partial ordering of the...

We examine a dynamic, durable goods model. A monopolist faces two types of consumers who value the monopolist’s goods differently. The quality of the good improves over time and an improvement is only valuable to consumers if they have previous improvements. In each period, the monopolist can...

New technology is usually expensive and it takes time for manufacturers to make the technology more accessible. In the stereo industry, the first Super Audio Compact Disk (SACD) player made by Sony, SCD-1, sold for $5,000 in 1999; in 2002 the cheapest of Sony's new SACD players, SCD-CE775, had a...

Self regulation is a mechanism of quality vigilance that is frequently used in credence good industries. The providers in these markets generally form a Self Regulated Organization (SRO), composed by some members of the industry, whose main job is to convince consumers through an active...

It is widely speculated that the adoption of a technology takes off to be self-sustaining if it reaches the critical mass. However, the sponsors of competing technologies may engage in strategic maneuvering in the adoption process. Indeed, this paper shows that in the de facto standardization...

We examine patent pools in the context of a consortium standard. Although such pools of complementary technologies are approved by antitrust authorities, the actual implementation has proved to be problematic. We identify two possible obstacles: free riding and bargaining failure. We also...

This paper derives firm boundaries as the outcome of an equilibrium coordination mechanism. The analysis is premised on the notion that efficient production and distribution are achieved through a mechanism that coordinates three basic activities: i) input acquisition, ii) production, iii)...

In this paper, an infinitely-repeated Bertrand game is considered. The model has a two-tier relationship; two firms make a self-enforced collusive agreement and each firm writes a law-enforced contract to its privately-informed agent. The main finding is that in optimal collusion, interaction...