Competitive bidding (as auctions) is commonly used to procure goods and services. Public buyers are often mandated by law to adopt competitive procedures to ensure transparency and promote full competition. Recent theoretical literature, however, suggests that open competition can perform poorly...

Why do women hit the glass ceiling? Women are hired, but then fail to rise through the ranks. We propose a novel explanation for this pattern, namely preference- and belief-free discrimination. In our setting, an employer can increase effort by inducing differential value distributions for a...

We consider multi-stage games, where at each stage, players receive private signals about past and current states, past actions and past signals, and choose actions. We fully characterize the distributions over actions, states, and signals that obtain in any (sequential) communication...