Game Theory plays a fundamental role in the social sciences. In this dissertation, we present three essays---the first two dealing with the pure theory of games and the third with an application of game theory to political economy. In the firstessay, we consider the effect of unbounded...

This thesis consists of two essays. In the first essay, we analyze a two-stage game, with coalition formation in the first stage and Cournot oligopoly in the second, to show how coalition formation takes place and affects the environmental level.In open membership games with symmetric players,...

CHAPTER 1: Informational Control and Organizational DesignThis essay focuses on organizational issues of allocating authority between an uninformed principal and an informed expert. We show that the established result of Dessein (2002) that delegating decisions to a perfectly informed expert is...

Auctions are among the oldest economic institutions in place---they have been used since antiquity to sell a wide variety of goods, and their basic form has remained unchanged. In this dissertation, I explore the efficiency of common auctions when values are interdependent---the value to a...

This dissertation examines a natural signaling mechanism in a two-sided matching market between firms and workers. We consider a basic game of incomplete information. Each agent knows her own preferences over matches, but uncertain about other agent preferences. Each worker can send a limited...

Many important phenomena (electoral competition, R&D races, lobbying) are instances of multiple simultaneous contests with unconditional commitment of limited resources. Specifically, the following game is analyzed in the first chapter. Two players compete in a number of simultaneous contests....

This thesis consists of three chapters. In the first chapter, we consider coalition formationgames with externalities. A natural extension of superadditivity is not sufficient to imply that the grand coalition is efficient when externalities are present. We provide a condition, analogous to...

This thesis consists of three essays on game theory.In the first essay we consider an endogenous formation of researchjoint ventures by introducing heterogeneity of the firms. When thefirms are characterized by a one dimensional parameter, we showthat there is a tendency towards similar firms...

Efficient allocation of scarce resources is one of the central themes in economics. The essays in this thesis approach two aspects of this problem. In the first essay I consider the problem of the efficient provision of a public good with congestion in a setting with asymmetric information....

Learning about an underlying uncertainty from observing the actions of other agents is a widespread phenomenon in many social interactions. This thesis looks different aspects of the phenomenon of informational cascades that results due to this social learning. The first essay theoretically...