We propose an elementary theory of wars fought by fully rational contenders that features three of the main rationalist explanations for armed conflicts: uncertainty, commitment, and indivisibility. Two parties play a Markov game that combines stages of bargaining, where offers are made, with...

A key to the Coase conjecture is the monopolist's inability to commit to a price, which leads consumers to believe that a high current price will be followed by low future prices. This paper studies the robustness of the Coase conjecture with respect to these beliefs of consumers. In particular,...

I derive a refinement of sequential equilibria of a noncooperative bargaining game when one player has incomplete information about the time preference of the other player. I show that if the types for this latter player are drawn from some totally ordered and finite lattice, Grossman &...

This paper studies a two-sided incomplete information bargaining model between a seller and a buyer. The buyer has an outside option, which is modeled as a sequential search process during which he can also choose to return to bargaining at any time. Two cases considered: In Regime I, both...

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...

This experimental study investigates two bargaining games with twosided incomplete information between a seller and a buyer. In the first game with no outside options many subjects do not use the incomplete information to their advantage as predicted. We find that a model with adjusting priors...

We analyze a continuous-time bargaining game of two-sided incomplete information without time discounting. Consistent with existing results, no trade occurs in the unique equilibrium of this game. Next we assume that players have imperfect information about their types; that is, they do not...

In this paper, we examine the optimal mechanism design of selling an indivisible object to one regular buyer and one publicly known buyer, where inter-buyer resale cannot be prohibited. The resale market is modeled as a stochastic ultimatum bargaining game between the two buyers. We fully...