Many conflicts in numerous parts of the developing world can be traced to disputes over land ownership, land use and land degradation. In this paper we test the hypothesis that differences in knowledge structures on land tenure and market systems between different leaders within these countries...

I study the incentives of Cournot duopolists to share their technologies with their competitor in markets where intellectual property rights are absent and imitation is costless. The trade-off between a signaling effect and an expropriation effect determines the technology-sharing incentives. In...

An innovative firm chooses strategically whether to patent its process innovation or rely on secrecy. By doing so, the firm manages its rival’s beliefs about the size of the innovation, and affects the incentives in the product market. Different measures of competitive pressure in the product...

This paper analyses an entry timing game with uncertain entry costs. Two firms receive costless signals about the cost of a new project and decide when to invest. We characterize the equilibrium of the investment timing game with private and public signals. We show that competition leads the two...

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...

This paper analyzes the case of a principal who wants to provide an agent with proper incentives to explore a hypothesis that can be either true or false. The agent can shirk, thus never proving the hypothesis, or he can avail himself of a known technology to produce fake successes. This latter...

The paper analyzes how spillovers in the product market affect the incentives of firms to reveal information about their innovative productivity. Such spillovers create a free-rider effect in the patent race that countervails the familiar business-stealing effect. The equilibrium disclosure...

The abundance of transaction data available on the Internet tends to make information more transparent in electronic marketplaces. In such a transparent environment, it becomes easier for suppliers to obtain information that may allow them to infer their rivals' costs. Is this good news or bad...

Predictions under common knowledge of payoffs may differ from those under arbitrarily, but finitely, many orders of mutual knowledge; Rubinstein's (1989)Email game is a seminal example. Weinstein and Yildiz (2007) showed that the discontinuity in the example generalizes: for all types with...

Models of choice where agents see others as less sophisticated than themselves have significantly different, sometimes more accurate, predictions in games than does Nash equilibrium. When it comes to mechanism design, however, they turn out to have surprisingly similar implications. This paper...