We build a theoretical model to study the welfare effects and resulting policy implications of firms’ market power in a frictional labor market. Our environment has two main characteristics: wages play a role in allocating labor across firms and there is a finite number of agents. We find that...

This paper asks how to design a revenue-maximizing auction in the presence of post-auction market competition and asymmetric information. In this situation, bidders, depending on the auction mechanism, can signal their type through their bidding behavior which influences the outcome of the...

This paper examines the development of wage inequality in the context of a Burdett- Mortensen (1998) model that is extended to incorporate worker heterogeneity through skill requirements in the production process. In this environment, wage dispersion is a natural consequence of firms pursuing...

In Hungary and the Central-European region, state regulation has been at the forefront of interest since the beginning of the economic transition. Among the many interesting questions raised, we would like to analyze the problem of building an appropriate regulatory system allowing the industry...

We provide theoretical and empirical analysis of a selling mechanism used by an Internet web-site that combines important features of auctions and gambling. This is the first analysis of such a selling mechanism, which provides insights into how the two kinds of behavior might be related in real...

We consider a model of directed search where the sellers are allowed to post general mechanisms. Regardless of the number of buyers and sellers, the sellers are able extract all the surplus of the buyers by introducing entry fees and making their price schedule positively sloped in the number of...

Burdett, Shi and Wright (2001) offer a directed search model where the buyers decide which seller to visit after observing the price each seller posts, and showed that there exists a unique symmetric equilibrium. Coles and Eeckhout (2003) showed that there is a continuum of symmetric equilibria,...

In this paper, we characterize the set of pure strategy undominated equilibria in differentiated Bertrand oligopolies with linear demand and constant unit costs when firms may prefer not to produce. When all firms are active, there is a unique equilibrium. However, there is a continuum of...

We study auctions with outside options determined through bargaining in an outside market. We show that auctions with less information revelation to bidders may yield higher revenues. It is never optimal for the auctioneer to reveal information after the auction, while it may be optimal to do so...

We develop a dynamic matching and bargaining game with aggregate uncertainty about the relative scarcity of a commodity. We use our model to study price discovery in a decentralized exchange economy: Traders gradually learn about the state of the market through a sequence of multilateral...