Can direct democracy provisions improve welfare over pure representative democracy? This paper studies how such provisions affect politicians’ incentives and selection. While direct democracy allows citizens to correct politicians’ mistakes, it also reduces the incentives of elected...

In a product choice game played between a long lived seller and an infnite sequence of buyers, we assume that buyers cannot observe past signals. To facilitate the analysis of applications such as online auctions (e.g. eBay), online shopping search engines (e.g. BizRate.com) and consumer...

We analyze social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model in which available technologies have correlated payoffs. Each generation experiments within a set of policies whose payoffs are initially unknown and drawn from the path of a Brownian motion with drift. Marginal...

We study an infinitely repeated game where two players with equal discount factors play a simultaneous-move stage game. Player one monitors the stagegame actions of player two imperfectly, while player two monitors the pure stagegame actions of player one perfectly. Player one’s type is...

For two-person complete-information strategic games with transferable utility, all major variable-threat bargaining and arbitration solutions coincide. This confluence of solutions by luminaries such as Nash, Harsanyi, Raiffa, and Selten, is more than mere coincidence. Staying in the class of...

We model a long-run relationship as an infinitely repeated game played by two equally patient agents. In each period, the agents play an extensive-form game of perfect information. There is incomplete information about the type of player 1 while player 2’s type is commonly known. We show that...

Cripps et al. (2005) conjectured that in an infinitely repeated game with two equally patient players, if there is positive probability that the players could be Stackelberg types, then equilibrium behavior would resemble a war of attrition, i.e., a two-sided reputation result would hold. In...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer’s problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer’s objective...

I develop a dynamic model of costly private provision of public goods where agents can also invest in cost-reducing technologies. Despite the n+1 stocks in the model, the analysis is tractable and the (Markov perfect) equilibrium unique. The frame-work is used to derive optimal incomplete...

Why do some markets remain liquid even when there is a positive gain from trade? In order to understand the real determinants of market liquidity in decentralized markets, we are going to analyze this question in a competitive market setting when both search frictions and adverse selection play...