We model strategic competition in a market with asymmetric information as a noncooperative game in which each firm competes for the business of a buyer of unknown type by offering the buyer a catalog of products and prices. The timing in our model is Stackelberg: in the first stage, given the...

There are many situations in which a customer’s proclivity to buy the product of any firm depends not only on the classical attributes of the product such as its price and quality, but also on who else is buying the same product. Under quite general circumstances, it turns out that...

We will call a game a reachable (pure strategy) equilibria game if starting from any strategy by any player, by a sequence of best-response moves we are able to reach a (pure strategy) equilibrium. We give a characterization of all finite strategy space duopolies with reachable equilibria. We...

In economics, the standard approach to language is that talk is cheap. Here, instead, language is a social convention that affects utility. Unless language is used in its ordinary sense, it cannot help to coordinate actions because there is no way of decoding it. This points to a unique...

We propose a criterion of stability for two-sided markets with asymmetric information. A central idea is to formulate matching functions, off-path beliefs conditional on counterfactual pairwise deviations, and on-path beliefs in the absence of such deviations. A matching-belief configuration is...

A government bargains a mutually convenient agreement with a multinational corporation to extract a natural resource. The corporation bears the initial investment and earns as a return a share on the profits. The host country provides access and guarantee conditions of operation. Being the...

A government bargains a mutually convenient agreement with a multinational corporation to extract a natural resource. The corporation bears the initial investment and earns as a return a share on the profits. The host country provides access and guarantee conditions of operation. Being the...