“Overbidding” with respect to risk-neutral Nash predictions in first-price auction experiments has been consistently reported in the literature. One possible explanation for overbidding is that participants in these experiments do not have a clear perception of probabilities, which causes...

We show that a non-Bayesian learning procedure leads to very permissive implementation results concerning the efficient allocation of resources in a dynamic environment where impatient, privately informed agents arrive over time, and where the designer gradually learns about the distribution of...

Advertising and price have been shown to signal product quality. Most works limit the number of types to high and low quality. I characterize the optimal separating marketing strategy when both quality and marginal cost are uncertain and continuous variables.

Random choices of prices and product characteristics can be used by a contestable monopolist to deter entry and fully extract the monopoly rent. We develop this idea in a model of Bertrand price competition. In equilibrium, one firm enters the market and makes choices that are unpredictable to...

According to the well-known “merger paradox”, in a Cournot market game mergers are generally unprofitable unless most firms merge. The present paper proposes an optimal merger mechanism. With this mechanism mergers are never unprofitable, more profitable than in other known mechanisms, and...

Laitinen (1980) derives an input allocation model for a multiproduct firm that first maximizes revenue and second maximizes profit. While theoretically elegant, the model has never been formulated empirically because of the complexity of the model’s price-deflated terms. This paper derives the...

Using grocery store data we study the relationship between dispersion and the business cycle. Our findings reveal that overall there is no robust and significant relationship; however, these mask important heterogeneity in the cyclicality of dispersion at the category level.

We present a polynomial time method for identifying the maximal set in excess demand at a given payoff vector. This set can be used in “large” partnership formation problems to identify the minimum element in the set of individually rational payoff vectors at which there is no overdemanded...

We endogenize the trading mechanism selection in a model of directed search with risk averse buyers and show that the unique symmetric equilibrium entails all sellers using fixed price trading. Mechanisms that prescribe the sale price as a function of the realized demand (auctions, bargaining,...

Theoretical explanations for price stickiness used in businesses cycle models are diverse (e.g., information processing delays, rational inattention and fair pricing), with each theory resulting in a different implication for inflation dynamics. Using an autoregressive conditional binomial...