We study optimal price discrimination when a monopolist faces a continuum of consumers with reference-dependent preferences. A consumer's valuation for product quality consists of an intrinsic valuation affected by a private state signal (type), and a gain-loss valuation that depends on...

How can we know in advance whether simplifying assumptions about beliefs will make a difference in the conclusions of game-theoretic models? We define critical types to be types whose rationalizable correspondence is sensitive to assumptions about arbitrarily high-order beliefs. We show that a...

Is there reason to believe that our brains have evolved to make efficient decisions so that the details of the internal process are irrelevant? I develop a model which illustrates a limitation of adaptive processes: improvements tend to come in the form of kludges. A kludge is a marginal...

We offer a theory of the sunk cost fallacy as an optimal response to limited memory. As new information arrives, a decision-maker may not remember all the reasons he began a project. The sunk cost gives additional information about future profits and informs subsequent decisions. The Concorde...

We investigate a common-value labor setting in which firms interview a worker prior to hiring. When firms have private information about the worker’s value and interview decisions are kept private, many firms may enter the market, interview, and hire with positive probability. When firms’...

We study mechanism design problems in quasi-linear environments where the envelope theorem and revenue equivalence principle fail due to non-convex and non-differentiable valuations. We obtain a characterization of incentive compatibility based on the Mirrlees representation of the indirect...