We offer a simple economic model of repeated barter to explore current economic exchange in Russia: individuals trade with each other in a dynamic environment where the threat of dissolving the relationship constrains the incentives to cheat. We show how the value of future interactions affects...

This paper explores the private and social benefits from barter exchange in a monetized economy. We first prove a no-trade theorem regarding the ability of firms with double-coincidences-of-wants to negotiate improvements in trade among themselves relative to the market outcomes. We then...

This paper examines individual decision making when decisions reflect on people's ability to learn. The authors address this problem in the context of a manager making investment decisions on a project over time. They show that, in an effort to appear as a fast learner, the manager will...

We study how competition in nonlinear pricing between two principals (sellers) affects market participation by a privately informed agent (consumer). When participation is restricted to all or nothing (intrinsic agency), the agent must choose between both principals' contracts and selecting her...

We present a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a class of optimal control problems with pure state constraints for which the objective function is linear in the state variable but the objective function is otherwise only restricted to be upper semicontinuous in the control variable.

An aggregate game is a normal-form game with the property that each player’s payoff is a function only of his own strategy and an aggregate function of the strategy profile of all players. Aggregate games possess a set of purely algebraic properties that can often provide simple...

We study games of public delegated common agency under asymmetric information. Us- ing tools from non-smooth analysis and optimal control, we derive best responses and characterize equilibria (both continuous and discontinuous) using self-generating opti- mization programs of which any...