The Traveling Salesman Problem and its cousin, the Vehicle Routing Problem, are typically studied in the field of Operations as a problem of optimization. In this paper, we show how to generalize the framework to handle any economic optimization problem using the idea of opportunity cost. We...

In this paper, we characterize adversarial decision-making as a choice between competing interpretations of evidence ("models") constructed by interested parties. We show that if a court cannot perfectly determine which party's model is more likely to have generated the evidence, then...

We examine the role of competition and mergers in bargaining by embedding a performance game, in which retail prices are determined by competition, into an axiomatic bilateral bargaining model, in which suppliers and retailers negotiate wholesale terms. We prove existence and uniqueness of what...

In a private values, open auction, we show that bidder surplus can be expressed as a simple difference between unconditional moments of order statistics. The strength of the result is its simplicity and generality, as we dispense with the typical assumptions of independence and/or symmetry. We...

In this paper, we characterize adversarial decision-making as a choice between competing interpretations of evidence ("models") constructed by interested parties. We show that if a court cannot perfectly determine which party's model is more likely to have generated the evidence, then...

Following merger, an optimal mechanism discriminates against merging bidders with higher reserve prices and by allocating more often towards non-merging bidders. In this setting, we show that mergers always harm the auctioneer, benefit non-merging bidders, can increase total surplus, and have...

A vertical merger model represents a complex system built on (i) a network of e.g., upstream manufacturers and downstream retailers (ii) who bargain bilaterally in the presence of externalities (iii) created by competition between downstream retailers (iv) facing a consumer demand surface. We...

Public policy toward innovation faces a trade-off: Increasing the compensation of successful inventors increases dynamic efficiency by spurring technological progress, but it decreases static efficiency by enlarging a wedge between price and marginal cost. In making this trade-off, public policy...

Enforcement agencies have a relatively good understanding of how to measure the loss of price competition caused by merger. However, when firms compete in multiple dimensions, merger effects are not well understood. In this paper, we study mergers in industries where firms compete by setting...

The downstream effects of mergers between manufacturers of differentiated consumer products are partly determined by the relationship between the merging manufacturers and retailers. That relationship may be such that the retail price effects of the merger are exactly those if the manufacturers...