Two popular selling methods are compared in a one-period correlated private-values model. The seller of an object has to decide whether to sell it by posting a fixed price or by an auction. Without auctioning costs, an auction (with a reserve price) is always preferable. With positive auctioning...

A model is presented in which market prices systematically understate fundamental values. The result follows from assumptions that the market is organized along auction lines with private information and is imperfect in that owners are occasionally forced to sell in order to raise cash for...

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...

We consider a transaction costs model of sovereign debt buybacks in this paper. We show that both secret and publicly known buybacks are profitable for the debtor country. Furthermore, the government of the debtor country would like to spend all of its initial endowment to buy back its debt as...

In this paper, we examine the optimal mechanism design of selling an indivisible object to one regular buyer and one publicly known buyer, where inter-buyer resale cannot be prohibited. The resale market is modeled as a stochastic ultimatum bargaining game between the two buyers. We fully...

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 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 do have analogs in the case of infinitely repeated games [Lipman, B., Wang, R.,...