This paper models strategic interactions between a product supplier, a provider of information about product quality, and end users, in the context of road transportation. Using a game-theoretical analysis of suppliers' pricing strategies, we assess the social welfare effects of traffic...

Sellers in real-estate markets, on internet platforms, in auction houses, and so forth, routinely pose non-binding price requests. Using a laboratory experiment, we examine how competition moderates the way such cheap-talk communication affects trade between buyers and sellers. For bilateral...

Incentives based on esteem, honor and shame are increasingly popular and easy to use due to modern surveillance techniques. However, the use of shaming is controversial: critics argue that delegating punishment to a crowd can lead to mob justice and a loss of control over the size of the...

This paper reports the results of an individual real effort laboratory experiment where subjects are paid for measured performance. Measured performance equals actual performance plus noise. We compare a stable environment where the noise is small with a volatile environment where the noise is...

Theoretical analyses of (optimal) performance measures are typically performed within the realm of the linear agency model. This model implies that, for a given compensation scheme, the agent’s optimal effort is unrelated to the amount of noise in the performance measure. In contrast,...

In the economics profession there is a fierce debate whether industrial and innovation policy should be targeted to specific sectors or firms. This paper discusses the welfare effects of such targeted policies from the perspective of strategic game theory of the firm. A theoretical case for...

This paper examines international trade in tainted food and other low-quality products. Wefirst find that for a large class of environments, free trade is the trading system that conveysthe highest incentives to produce non-tainted high-quality goods by foreign exporters.However, free trade...

We investigate the nature of market failure in a dynamic version of Akerlof (1970) where identical cohorts of a durable good enter the market over time. In the dynamic model, equilibria with qualitatively different properties emerge. Typically, in equilibria of the dynamic model, sellers with...

We investigate the nature of the adverse selection problem in a market for adurable goodwhere trading and entry of new buyers and sellers takes place in continuoustime. In thecontinuous time model equilibria with properties that are qualitativelydifferent from thestatic equilibria, emerge....

Banks provide risky loans to firms which have superior information regarding the quality of their projects. Due to asymmetric information the banks face the risk of adverse selection. Credit Value-at-Risk (CVaR) regulation counters the problem of low quality, i.e. high risk, loans and therefore...