The paper presents a simple pairwise meetings model of trade. The new feature is that agents have asymmetric information about the true state of the world. The focus is on the transmission of the information through the process of trade. The qualitative question is : to what extent is the...

In this article, we consider how important developments in game theory have contributed to the theory of industrial organization. Our goal is not to survey the theory of industrial organization; rather, we consider the contribution of game theory through a careful discussion of a small number of...

The main idea of this article is that geographical concentration of stores selling similar products can be explained by consumers' imperfect information and their resulting need to search the market. A cluster of stores sustained by these forces is not necessarily located at the point that...

This paper discusses the regulation of oligopolistic differentiated-product industries. The regulator can control prices and impose quantity restrictions, but cannot control the quality choices of the firms. We inquire about the optimal choice of regulatory regime-whether and under what...

We consider a market in which an expert must exert costly but unobservable effort to identify the service that meets the consumer's need. In our model, experts offer competing contracts and the consumer may gather multiple opinions. We explore the incentives that a competitive sampling of prices...