Consider a principal who hires heterogeneous agents to work for him over T periods, without prior knowledge of their respective skills, and intends to promote one of them at the end. In each period the agents choose effort levels and produce random outputs, independently of each other, and are...

There are many situations in which a customer's proclivity to buy the product of any firm depends not only on the classical attributes of the product such as its price and quality, but also on who else is buying the same product. We model these situations as games in which firms compete for...

We show that intermediate goods can be sourced to firms on the "outside" (that do not compete in the final product market), even when there are no economies of scale or cost advantages for these firms. What drives the phenomenon is that "inside" firms, by accepting such orders, incur the...