What are the welfare effects of enhanced dissemination of public information through the media and disclosures by market participants with high public visibility? For instance, is it always desirable to have frequent and timely publications of economic statistics by government agencies and the...

In recent years, many social scientists have claimed that trust plays an important role in economic and social transactions. Despite its proposed importance, the measurement and the definition of trust seem to be not fully settled, and the identification of the exact role of trust in economic...

This paper analyses collusion by innovative firms and the role of patents in a continuous-time real options framework. A patent-investment race model is formulated in which innovative firms bargain and reach collusive agreements. It is shown that, while collusion always delays innovation, it...

We consider an oligopolistic market game, in which the players are competing firm in the same market of a homogeneous consumption good. The consumer side is represented by a fixed demand function. The firms decide how much to produce of a perishable consumption good, and they decide upon a...

We consider a simple model that combines elements of search and social learning. Acting in sequence, and observing the action adopted by a previous agent, agents must search for an action. We explore why agent heterogeneity may increase expected payoffs and demonstrate that social learning may...

The two essential features of a decentralized economy taken into account are, first, that individual agents need some information about other agents in order to meet potential trading partners, which requires some communication or interaction between these agents, and second, that in general...

In an experimental standard Cournot Oligopoly we test the importance of models of behavior characterized by imitation of succesful behavior. We find that the players appear to the rather reluctant to imitate.

We consider a principal-multiagent framework with adverse selection when contracting is possible ex ante. However, enforcement of contracts is imperfect, which results in inefficiencies. We study how group contracting may or may not mitigate those inefficiencies.

In this paper signals are observed by two receivers who have different preferences about the sender and therefore respond to information about himin different ways. This can result in a Catch-22 for the sender; if he sends a signal to induce a positive response from one receiver, this may induce...