A decision maker (DM) considers the acquisition of a multi-attribute object with uncertain qualities which can be discovered at a cost. DM's problem is to decide how much to invest in the discovery and whether to adopt or discard based on partial information. We characterize the solution in some...

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...

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 bargaining process is a critical part of the model. Due to the information asymmetry, we cannot use the simple surplus sharing solutions that are common in the search literature. Instead, we assume that the buyer has all the bargaining power and offers a general mechanism which the seller...

A buyer seeks to procure a service and solicits bids from sellers. The cost of the service depends on characteristics that are only known to the buyer ("common values"). The buyer can choose how many bids to solicit and the number of solicited bids cannot be disclosed verifiably. We characterize...

The basic intuition that motivates this paper is that the presence of non-maximizing agents creates incentives for maximizing agents to take advantage of them, and when "frictions" are sufficiently small, these incentives might translate seemingly small deviations from maximizing behavior into...

This paper discusses the regulation of oligopolistic differentiated product industries under conditions of incomplete information. The regulator can control the prices, and impose quantity restrictions, but cannot control effectivelythe quality choices of the firms. We inquire about the optimal...

This paper investigates the functioning of markets for credence goods. These are markets in which the information asymmetries are of the form that sellers are also experts who determine customers' needs. It examines the role of customers' search for multiple opinions in disciplining experts. It...