In the first essay, I analyze a symmetric duopolistic market where each firm's choice regarding certain quality attributes such as the environmental friendliness of its product is its own private information. I find that the extent of horizontal differentiation between firms plays a crucial role...

The paper examines allocation of a resource in "hierarchies", where individuals are exogenously ordered and those ranked higher in the ordering make claim on the resource earlier. Individuals get strictly increasing and strictly concave payoff from resource extracted, giving rise to endogenous...