The paper contrasts the exact equilibria of games where sellers compete in price with the rational expectations equilibria of these games. It is shown that the distribution of prices offered by sellers in both the exact and rational expectations equilibrium converge weakly to the same limit as...

In the common agency problem multiple mechanism designer simultaneously attempt to control the behavior of a single privately informed agent. The paper shows that the allocations associated with equilibria relative to any ad hoc set of fessible mechanisms can be reproduce as equilibria relative...

A competitive economy is studied in which sellers offer alternative direct mechanisms to buyers who have correlated private information about their valuations. In contrast to the monopoly case where sellers charge entry fees and extract all buyers surplus, it is shown that in the \emph{unique}...

In this paper a competitive distribution of auctions is described for an economy consisting of an infinite number of buyers and sellers, all of whom differ according to their valuation for the single indivisible object being traded. A competitive distribution of auctions is such that no seller...

In modelling competition among mechanism designers, it is necessary to specify the set of feasible mechanisms. These specifications are often borrowed from the optimal mechanism design literature and exclude mechanisms that are natural in a competitive environment; for example, mechanisms that...

In this paper we study a large market in which sellers compete by offering auctions to buyers instead of simple fixed price contracts. Two variants of the model are studied. One extends a model first analyzed by Wolinsky (1988) in which buyers learn their valuations only after meeting sellers....

A competitive economy is studied in which sellers offer alternative direct mechanisms to buyers who have private information about their own private use value for the commodity being traded. In addition the commodity has a common value to all buyers, perhaps represented by the future resale...

Pre-marital investments by spouses are largely viewed as public goods within the marriage. So individuals may underinvest. But individuals also use their investments to compete for spouses with higher investments. In a large marriage market, the higher equilibrium match quality obtained by...

This short paper considers the validity of assuming that principals make their common agent a single take it or leave it contract offer instead of negotiating over the contract in a more complex way. The interest in this question arises from recent examples in the literature that illustrate...

A multi-unit auction environment similar to Ebay is studied. Sellers who wish to sell a single unit of a homogenous good set reserve prices for their own independently run auctions. Buyers who hope to acquire a single unit bid as often as they like in a dynamic second price auction. When the...