Two firms produce substitute goods of unknown quality. At each stage the firms set prices and a consumer with private information and unit demand buys from one of the firms. Both firms and consumers see the entire history of prices and purchases. Will such markets aggregate information? Will the...

It is widely known that loss aversion leads individuals to dislike risk, and as has been argued by many researchers, in many instances this creates an incentive for firms to shield consumers and employees against economic risks. Complementing previous research, we show that consumer loss...

It is widely known that loss aversion leads individuals to dislike risk, and as has been argued by many researchers, in many instances this creates an incentive for firms to shield consumers and employees against economic risks. Complementing previous research, we show that consumer loss...

This article presents a new approach to analyze the equilibrium set of symmetric, differentiable games by separating multiple symmetric equilibria and asymmetric equilibria. This separation allows the investigation of, for example, how various parameter constellations affect the scope for...

We provide conditions that simplify applying Reny's (1999) better-reply security to Bayesian games, and use these conditions to prove the existence of equilibria for classes of games in which payoff discontinuities arise only at "ties." These games include a general version of all-pay contests,...

This paper studies the interplay between asset bubbles and product market competition. It offers two main insights. The first is that imperfect competition creates a wedge between interest rates and the marginal product of capital. This makes rational bubbles possible even when there is no...

We study a continuous-time game of strategic experimentation in which the players try to assess the failure rate of some new equipment or technology. Breakdowns occur at the jump times of a Poisson process whose unknown intensity is either high or low. In marked contrast to existing models, we...

A key obstacle to coordination and cooperation in many networked environments is that behavior in each bilateral relationship is not observable to individuals outside that relationship: that is, information is local. This paper investigates when players can use communication to replicate any...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

We study the information flows that arise among a set of agents with local knowledge and directed payoff interactions, which differ among pairs of agents. First, we study the equilibrium of a game where, before making decisions, agents can invest in pairwise active communication (speaking) and...