In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

This paper provides a new look at the well-known trade-off between efficiency and equality with an agent-based model. By way of a computer program, our study simulates the interactions of agents producing and trading goods within different market structures and looks at the resulting production...

In a centralized marketplace that was designed to be simple, we identify participants whose choices are dominated. Using administrative data from Hungary, we show that college applicants make obvious mistakes: they forgo the free opportunity to receive a tuition waiver worth thousands of...

We consider innovation contests for the procurement of an innovation under moral hazard and adverse selection. Innovators have private information about their abilities, and choose unobservable effort in order to produce innovations of random quality. Innovation quality is not contractible. We...

Evolutionary modellers have recently taken an interest in the use of computer simulations based on genetic algorithms; this paper offers two contributions to this literature. In the initial sections we aim to place the GA into a general review of evolutionary dynamics, including Fisher's...

Many sales, sports, and research contests are put in place to maximize contestants’ performance. We investigate and provide a complete characterization of the prize structures that achieve this objective in settings with many contestants. The contestants may be ex-ante asymmetric in their...

Horizontal shifts in bid curves observed in wholesale electricity markets are consistent with Cournot competition. Quantity competition reduces the informational requirements associated with evaluating market performance because the markups of all producers then depend on the same inverse...

Players often engage in high-profile public communications to demonstrate their confidence of winning before they carry out actual competitive activities. This paper investigates players' incentives to conduct such pre-contest communication. We assume that a player suffers a cost when he sends a...

In classical models of markets, the state of nature is revealed regardless of the actions agents take. If instead agents can uncover information they will determine which states can be distinguished and thus which goods are traded. Competitive equilibria can then be inefficient. One source of...

Online review aggregators (e.g., booking dot com or ClubKviar) provide detailed information about experience goods, such as restaurants and hotels. This study fosters the understanding of how such aggregators modify competition, profits and welfare. Using a spokes model of horizontal...