In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

We study a model of collective decision making in which agents vote on the decision repeatedly until they agree, with the agents receiving no exogenous new information between two voting rounds but incurring a delay cost. Although preference conflict between the agents makes information...

We analyze bureaucracy and corruption in a market with decentralized exchange and <93>lemons.<94> Exchange is modelled as a sequence of bilateral, random matches. Agents have private information about the quality of goods they produce and can supplement trade with socially inefficient bribes....</94></93>

We study party formation in a general model of collective decision-making, modelling parties as agglomerations of policy positions championed by decision-makers. We show that in the presence of economies of party size and a one-dimensional policy space, players agglomerate into exactly two...

We study the implications of economies of party size in a model of party formation. We show that when the policy space is one-dimensional, candidates form at most two parties. This result does not depend on the magnitude of the economies of party size or sensitively on the nature of the...

We study auction design in the standard symmetric independent private values environment, where the seller lacks the commitment power to withhold an unsold object off the market. The seller has a single object and can conduct an infinite sequence of standard auctions with reserve prices to...

This paper presents a tractable framework for studying frictionless matching in school, work, and marriage when individuals have heterogeneous social and cognitive skills. In the model, there are gains to specialization and team production, but specialization requires communication and...

In this article I briefly review recent developments in search theory. Particular attention is given to the framework of directed search. I first illustrate the inefficiency that arises in the equilibrium of standard (undirected) search models. Then I provide a formulation of directed search and...

In this paper, we introduce private information into a market with search frictions and evaluate the relative efficiency of two pricing mechanisms, price posting and bargaining. Each seller chooses investment that determines the quality of the good. This quality is the seller's private...

In this paper we construct a two-country search model to determine the nominal exchange rate between two fiat monies. Our model allows agents to use any currency to trade for goods in all countries. However, search frictions restrict agents<92> opportunities for instantaneous arbitrage, and hence...</92>