wo most popular selling methods -- posted-price selling and auctions -- are compared in this paper. We confirm the common belief that auctions are most often used when the distribution of the object's value is widely dispersed. The choice of selling methods usually depends on the costs of...

Will generous return policies in auctions benefit bidders? We investigate this issue using second-price common-value auctions. Theoretically, we find that the bidding equilibrium is unique unless returns are free, in which case there exist multiple equilibria with different implications for...

To understand reasons for possible failures of 'good' economic reforms, we consider an institution which is always successful in making the best public decision from the utilitarian perspective. We show it is bound to introduce inequality if costs of a reform are privately known: the losers can...

We show that small switching costs can have surprisingly dramatic effects in infinitely repeated games if these costs are large relative to payoffs in a single period. This shows that the results in Lipman and Wang [2000] do have analogs in the case of infinitely repeated games. We also discuss...

In this paper we study a model of rational consumption and quitting in the context of harmful addictive goods. We assume that a person has imperfect information about his ability to resist and terminate the addiction. We first characterize the optimal consumption path of a non-addicted person,...

We investigate the role of consumer switching costs in a three-stage model in which the entrant and the incumbent firm set prices sequentially and then the consumers decide from which firm to buy. We characterize the unique subgame perfect equilibrium and find that even an entrant with a higher...