In a preemption game, players decide when to take an irreversible action. Delaying the action exogenously increases payoffs, but there is an early mover advantage. Riordan (1992) shows that in a preemption game with two asymmetric players, players act in decreasing order of efficiency. This...

We study a complete information preemption game in continuous time. A finite number of firms decide when to make an irreversible, observable investment. Upon investment, a firm receives flow profits which decrease in the number of firms that have invested. The cost of investment declines over...

We argue that a precedent is important not only because it changes the relative frequency of a certain event, making it positive rather than zero, but also because it changes the way that relative frequencies are weighed. Specifically, agents assess probabilities of future events based on past...