Bidders have to decide whether and when to incur the cost of estimating their own values in auctions. This can explain sniping - flurries of bids late in auctions with deadlines - as the result of bidders trying to avoid stimulating other bidders into examining their bid ceiling more carefully.

This is one chapter from the book, Judicial Independence: Economic Theory and Japanese Empirics, that Mark Ramseyer and Eric Rasmusen are writing. In preceding chapters we explain the institutions of modern Japan's judiciary and use regression analysis to test whether judges who rule in ways the...

Consider a Bertrand model in which each firm may be inactive with a known probability, so the number of active firms is uncertain. This activity level can be endogenized in several ways ---whether to incur a fixed cost of activity, for example, or what level of output to choose. Our model has a...

Hart & Moore (1999) construct a model to show that contracts perform poorly in complex environments when the state of the world is unverifiable and renegotiation cannot be ruled out. They implicitly assume one player can extort payment from another by threatening to take an inefficient action...

If there is queueing for an underpriced good, the queueing can eat up the entire surplus, eliminating the social value of the good. An implication is that there is a discontinuity in social welfare between "enough" and "not enough" for certain goods such as parking spaces. This implies that if...