This paper concerns multistage games, with and without discounting, in which each player can increase the level of an action over time so as to increase the other players' future payoffs. An action profile is achievable if it is the limit point of a subgame perfect equilibrium path. Necessary...

This paper analyzes the effects of buyer and seller risk aversion in first and second-price auctions. The setting is the classic one of symmetric and independent private values, with ex ante homogeneous bidders. However, the seller is able to optimally set the reserve price. In both auctions the...

This paper studies a class of dynamic voluntary contribution games in a setting with discounting and neoclassical payoffs (differentiable, strictly concave in the public good, and quasilinear in the private good). An achievable profile is the limit point of a subgame perfect equilibrium path --...

A product exhibits personal fit uncertainty when its consumers have idiosyncratic and uncertain values for it. Often a consumer can learn her long-run value quickly by obtaining the good for a trial period. Money back guarantees of satisfaction are commonly used to lower the cost to consumers of...

A monotone game is a multistage game in which no player can lower her action in any period below its previous level. A motivation for the monotone games of this paper is dynamic voluntary contribution to a public project. Each player's utility is a strictly concave function of the public good,...

Received auction theory prescribes that a reserve price which maximizes expected profit should be no less than the seller's own value for the auctioned object. In contrast, a common empirical observation is that many auctions have reserve prices set below sellers' values, even at zero. This...

We establish conditions under which an English auction for an indivisible risky asset has an efficient ex post equilibrium when the bidders are heterogeneous in both their exposures to, and their attitudes toward, the ensuing risk the asset will generate for the winning bidder. Each bidder's...

This paper analyzes the effects of buyer and seller risk aversion in first and second-price auctions. The setting is the classic one of symmetric and independent private values, with ex ante homogeneous bidders. However, the seller is able to optimally set the reserve price. In both auctions the...

Different markets are cleared by different types of prices - seller-specific prices that are uniform across buyers in some markets, and personalized prices tailored to the buyer in others. We examine a setting in which buyers and sellers make investments before matching in a competitive market....

Savage (1954) provided a set of axioms on preferences over acts that were equivalent to the existence of an expected utility representation. We show that in addition to this representation, there is a continuum of other "expected utility" representations in which for any act, the probability...