Countries have different comparative advantages in quality. These might be due to technological differences, or to reputation differences of the sort described in Klein & Leffler (1981). Reputation differences are particularly interesting, since good reputations are a form of “social...

Is it better to move first, or second— to innovate, or to imitate? We look at this in a context with both asymmetric information and payoff externalities. Suppose two players, one with superior information about market quality, consider entering one of two new markets immediately or waiting...

If there is competition for access to an underpriced good such as a free parking spot, the competition can eat up the entire surplus, eliminating the social value of the good. There is a discontinuity in social welfare between “enough” and “not enough,” with the minimum social welfare...

Is it better to move first, or second— to innovate, or to imitate? We look at this in a context with both asymmetric information and payoff externalities. Suppose two players, one with superior information about market quality, consider entering one of two new markets immediately or waiting...

Bidders in auctions must decide whether and when to incur the cost of estimating the most they are willing to pay. This can explain why people seem to get carried away, bidding higher than they had planned before the auction and then finding they had paid more than the object was worth to them....

A number of issues in the common law arise when agents make contracts on behalf of principals. Should a principal be bound when his agent makes a contract on his behalf that he would immediately wish to disavow? The tradeoffs resemble those in tort, so the least-cost avoider principle is useful...

One reason to call an activity a vice and suppress it is that it reduces a person’s future happiness more than it increases his present happiness. Gruber and Koszegi (2001) show how a vice tax can increase a person’s welfare in a model of multiple selves with hyperbolic preferences across...

This is an exposition of the BLP method of structural demand estimation using the random-coefficients logit model.

Using micro-level data on attorney incomes, we reconstruct the industrial organization of the Japanese legal services industry. These data suggest a bifurcated bar, with two sources of unusually high income: an idiosyncratic return to talent in Tokyo, and a compensating differential for the lack...

There is much confusion over what "hyperbolic discounting" means. I argue that what matters is the use of relativistic instead of objective time, not the shape of the discount function.