We study a flexible dynamic savings game in continuous time, where decision makers rotate in and out of power. These agents value spending more highly while in power creating a time-inconsistency problem. We provide a sharp characterization of Markov equilibria. Our analysis proceeds by...

Industries with significant scale economies or learning-by-doing may come to be dominated by a single firm. Economists have studied how likely this is to happen, and whether it is efficient, using models where buyers are price or quantity takers, even though these industries are often also...

There has been much discussion about what issues should be included in international 'trade' negotiations. Different countries, firms and activists groups have quite different views regarding which items should (or should not) be negotiated together. Proposals run the gamut from no linking to...

A "Nash equilibrium in Nash bargains" has become a workhorse bargaining model in applied analyses of bilateral oligopoly. This paper proposes a non-cooperative foundation for "Nash-in-Nash" bargaining that extends the Rubinstein (1982) alternating offers model to multiple upstream and downstream...

Empirical evidence suggests that money in the hands of mothers (as opposed to fathers) increases expenditures on children. Does this imply that targeting transfers to women promotes economic development? In this paper, we develop a noncooperative model of household decision making to answer this...

Despite extensive use of bargaining models in economics and despite Becker's insistence on the importance of altruism in families, the theoretical literature on bargaining ignores altruism and assumes that everyone is an egoist. This paper shows that incorporating altruism into cooperative...

Since formal rules can only partially reduce opportunistic behavior, third-party sanctioning to promote fairness is critical to achieving desirable social outcomes. Social norms may underpin such behavior, but they can also undermine it. We study one such norm the "don't be a toad" norm, as it...

We study a model of retrospective search in which an agent--a researcher, an online shopper, or a politician--tracks the value of a product. Discoveries beget discoveries and their observations are correlated over time, which we model using a Brownian motion. The agent, a standard exponential...

We evaluate dynamic oligopoly estimators with laboratory data. Using a stylized en-try/exit game, we estimate structural parameters under the assumption that the data are generated by a Markov-perfect equilibrium (MPE) and use the estimates to predict counterfactual behavior. The concern is that...

The foundations of incomplete contracts have been questioned using or extending the subgame perfect implementation approach of Moore and Repullo (1988). We consider the robustness of subgame perfect implementation to the introduction of small amounts of asymmetric information. We show that...