We solve for the optimal mechanism for selling two goods when the buyer's demand characteristics are unobservable. In the case of substitutable goods, the seller has an incentive to offer lotteries over goods in order to charge the buyers with large differences in the valuations a higher price...

A seller and a buyer bargain over the terms of trade for an object. The seller receives a perfect signal that determines the value of the object to both players, whereas the buyer remains uninformed. We analyze the infinite-horizon bargaining game in which the buyer makes all the offers. When...

The article discusses the close collaboration between governments and the financial industry. The author argues that governments and banks have formed an alliance against the real sector. He considers recent banking regulations as basically useless, if not dangerous, and proposes to split up...

This paper studies a two-sided incomplete information bargaining model between a seller and a buyer. The buyer has an outside option, which is modeled as a sequential search process during which he can also choose to return to bargaining at any time. Two cases considered: In Regime I, both...

The great controversy regarding the results of the application of market-oriented policies on the population's conditions of life, especially about the inequality in the distribution of income, has constituted the concern that has given origin to this paper. With the objective to test the...

The paper investigates price formation in a decentralized market with random matching. Agents are assumed to have subdued social preferences: buyers, for example, prefer a lower price to a higher one but experience reduced utility increases below a reference price which serves as a common...

We assess empirically the vertical price transmission mechanism between producer and consumer prices of milk products in Austria using monthly data for the period from January 1996 to February 2010. We consider explicitly the existence of asymmetries in the adjustment to the long-run equilibrium...

Credence goods markets suffer from inefficiencies arising from informational asymmetries between expert sellers and customers. While standard theory predicts that inefficiencies disappear if customers can verify the quality received, verifiability fails to yield efficiency in experiments with...