Pricing idiosyncratic products is often challenging because the seller, ex ante, lacks information about the demand for individual items. This paper develops a model of dynamic pricing for idiosyncratic products that features the optimal stopping structure and a seller that learns about...

Many markets, including markets for IPOs and debt issuances, are syndicated: each winning bidder invites competitors to join its syndicate to complete production. Using repeated extensive form games, we show that collusion in syndicated markets may become easier as market concentration falls,...

The U.S. residential real estate agency market presents a puzzle for economic theory: commissions on real estate transactions have remained high for decades even though entry is frequent and costs are low. We model the real estate agency market, and other brokered markets, as a game in which...

Revenue sharing between principals and agents is commonly used to balance double-sided moral hazard. We provide a theory of how, when such revenue-sharing is optimal, a principal allocates control rights over decisions that either party could make. We show that the principal either keeps control...

Many multi-product firms incur a complexity fixed cost when offering different product lines in different quality tiers relative to the case when offering all products lines in the same quality tier (high or low). Such fixed costs create an interdependency between firms' choices of quality tiers...

This review discusses frontier topics in economic geography as they relate to firms and agglomeration economies. We focus on areas where empirical research is scarce but possible. We first outline a conceptual framework for city formation that allows us to contemplate what empiricists might...

This chapter reviews academic research on the connections between agglomeration and innovation. We first describe the conceptual distinctions between invention and innovation. We then describe how these factors are frequently measured in the data and some resulting empirical regularities....

From the 1930s through today, many economists have conceived of large technical systems for the production of goods and services as a series of transactions. This point of view has led eminent economists to assert that transactions are the fundamental unit of analysis in the economic system.This...

In Chapter 2 we saw that the most economical locations for transactions in a task network are the so-called thin crossing points—places where transfers are easy to define, count and pay for. However, in many places in the task network, transfers of material, energy, and information are so...

A technology is a specific way to achieve a material goal. It describes a feasible path—a recipe—by which a group of people can arrive at a goal that none could achieve individually. Technical recipes thus require linkages between and among the various contributors to the technical...