Firms signal high quality through high prices even if the market structure is highly competitive and price competition is severe. In a symmetric Bertrand oligopoly where products may differ only in their quality, production cost is increasing in quality and the quality of each firm’s product...

The collection of information necessary for decision-making is often delegated to agents (e.g. bureaucrats, advisors, lawyers). If both the pros and cons of a decision have to be examined, it is better to use competing agents instead of a single agent. The reason is that two conflicting pieces...

There is extensive literature on whether courts or legislators produce efficient rules, but which of them produces rules efficiently? The law is subject to uncertainty ex ante; uncertainty makes the outcomes of trials difficult to predict and deters parties from settling disputes out of court. In...

The Nash bargaining solution of a modified bargaining problem in the contract space yields the pair of stationary subgame perfect equilibrium proposals in the alternating offers model, also for positive time between proposals. As time vanishes, convergence to the Nash bargaining solution is...

The bargaining model with stochastic order of proposing players is properly embedded in continuous time and it is strategically equivalent to the alternating offers model. For all parameter values, the pair of equilibrium proposals corresponds to the Nash bargaining solution of a modified...

We model the emergence of organization forms in a game between prospective entrepreneurs. Complementary roles arise endogenously in a way that admits a stable assignment of workers to firms. This contrasts with existing work on job matching, where stability typically requires workers to be...

There has been a long debate on equilibrium characterization in the negotiation model when players have different time preferences. We show that players behave quite differently under different time preferences than under common time preferences. Conventional analysis in this literature relies...

Short-term contracts and exogenous productivity growth are introduced in a simple wage bargaining model. The equilibrium utilities corresponding to militant union behaviour are independent of the contract length. The wage dynamics are linear if strike is credible (low wage shares) and nonlinear...

This paper argues that the notion of focal points is important in understanding bargaining processes. Recent literature confines a discussion of the usefulness of the notion to coordination problems and when bargaining experiments result in outcomes that are inconsistent with a straightforward...

Theoretical research on claims problems has concentrated on normative properties and axiomatizations of solution concepts. We complement these analyses by empirical evidence on the predictability of three classical solution concepts in a bankruptcy problem. We examine both people's impartial...