Agents compete to acquire a limited economic opportunity of uncertain pro…tability.Each agent decides how much he acquires public signals before making investmentunder fear of preemption. I show that equilibria have various levels of e¢ ciency undermild competition. The e¤ect of competition...

Idiosyncratic risk attitudes are usually assumed to be commonly knownand restricted to own payos. However, the alternatives faced by a decisionmaker often involve risks for others' payos as well. Motivated by theimportance of other-regarding preferences in social interactions, this paperexplores...

Whether incentive contracts perform better than trust in terms of productiveefficiency is usually explored by principal-agent experiments (mostinvolving only one agent). We investigate this issue in the context of athree-person ultimatum experiment, which is simpler and more neutrallyframed than...

This paper compares Bertrand and Cournot equilibria in a horizontallydifferentiated duopoly market with non-tournament R&D competition. We consider thatsuccess in R&D is uncertain. We show that whether firms invest more under Cournotcompetition or Bertrand competition is ambiguous and depends on...

A decision maker (DM) wishes to select a competent candidate to …ll a position.However, since the wage and task of the position is predetermined, the DM cannot usecontract as a screening device. This paper formulates the problem as a class of selectionproblem and derives the optimal selection...

Candidates compete to persuade a decision maker. The decision maker wishes toselect a candidate who possesses a certain ability. Then, as a signaling, each candidatedecides whether to perform a task whose performance statistically re‡ects the ability.However, since the cost of the performance...

Agents compete to solve a problem. Each agent knows own computational capacityas private information and simultaneously chooses either a risky or a safe problemsolving method. This paper analyzes the optimal prize schemes from the perspectiveof the prize designer who wishes to …nd a solution as...

The probability that actors in economic relationships break rules increases with the profits they thus expect to earn. It decreases with the probability and level of short - and long-term losses resulting from disclosure. It also decreases with the level of social context factors and intrinsic...

This paper examines the occurrence and fragility of information cascades in laboratory experiments.One group of low informed subjects make predictions in sequence. In a matchedpairs design, another set of high informed subjects observe the decisions of the first group andmake predictions....

The common prior assumption justifies private beliefs as posterior probabilities when updatinga common prior based on individual information. Common priors are pervasive in most economicmodels of incomplete information and oligopoly models with asymmetrically informed firms. Wedispose of the...