We endogenize the trade mechanism in a search economy with many homogenous sellers and many heterogeneous buyers of unobservable type. We study how heterogeneity and the traders' continuation values -- which are endogenous -- influence the sellers' choice of trade mechanism. Sellers trade off...

The housing rental market offers a unique laboratory for studying price stickiness. This paper is motivated by two facts: 1. Tenants' rents are remarkably sticky even though regular and expected recontracting would, by itself, suggest substantial rent flexibility. 2. Rent stickiness varies...

We study a bargaining model in which a buyer makes frequent offers to a privately informed seller, while gradually learning about the seller's type from “news.” We show that the buyer's ability to leverage this information to extract more surplus from the seller is remarkably limited. In...

We introduce aggregate uncertainty into a Rubinstein and Wolinsky (1985)-type dynamic matching and bilateral bargaining model. The market can be either in a high state, where there are more buyers than sellers, or in a low state, where there are more sellers than buyers. Traders do not know the...

Two agents endowed with di fferent individual conceptual spaces are engaged in a dialectic process to reach a common understanding. We model the process as a simple noncooperative game and demonstrate three results. When the initial disagreement is focused, the bargaining process has a zero-sum...

We study the steady state of a market with incoming cohorts of buyers and sellers who are matched pairwise and bargain under private information. We first consider generalized random-proposer take-it-or-leave-it offer games (GRP TIOLI games). This class of games includes a simple random-proposer...

We examine an evolutionary model of bargaining behavior in a society where resources are finite. Agents who develop better strategies for bargaining and trading come to dominate the population. We show that successful agents exhibit loss aversion and an "endowment effect." When information is...

The author studies the dual issues of allocation and coalition formation in a model of social learning. For a class of economies which can be expressed in terms of a real valued characteristic function, he first shows that all self-perpetuating allocations realized from a simple bargaining game...

I study a discrete-time dynamic bargaining game in which a buyer can choose to learn privately about her value of the good. Information generation takes time and is endogenous. After learning, the buyer can disclose verifiable evidence of her valuation to the seller. Examples include venture...