We examine the role of competition and mergers in bargaining by embedding a performance game, in which retail prices are determined by competition, into an axiomatic bilateral bargaining model, in which suppliers and retailers negotiate wholesale terms. We prove existence and uniqueness of what...

Following merger, an optimal mechanism discriminates against merging bidders with higher reserve prices and by allocating more often towards non-merging bidders. In this setting, we show that mergers always harm the auctioneer, benefit non-merging bidders, can increase total surplus, and have...

In this paper, we characterize adversarial decision-making as a choice between competing interpretations of evidence ("models") constructed by interested parties. We show that if a court cannot perfectly determine which party's model is more likely to have generated the evidence, then...

In a private values, open auction, we show that bidder surplus can be expressed as a simple difference between unconditional moments of order statistics. The strength of the result is its simplicity and generality, as we dispense with the typical assumptions of independence and/or symmetry. We...

A vertical merger model represents a complex system built on (i) a network of e.g., upstream manufacturers and downstream retailers (ii) who bargain bilaterally in the presence of externalities (iii) created by competition between downstream retailers (iv) facing a consumer demand surface. We...

This paper introduces a simple free web app that can teach regression to anyone who can point and click. Originally designed to teach Justice Department attorneys enough about regression so that they could cross examine rival experts, the app ``inverts'' the usual pedagogy: instead of showing...