This paper analyzes a unique dataset, which contains results of a large-scale experiment in the credit card market. Two puzzling phenomena are observed that suggest time inconsistency in consumer behavior: First, consumers prefer an introductory offer which has a lower interest rate with a...

This paper analyzes a unique dataset, which contains results of a large-scale experiment in the credit card market. Two strange phenomena that suggest time inconsistency in consumer behavior are observed: First, consumers prefer an introductory offer which has a lower interest rate with a...

A family of ascending package auction models is introduced in which bidders may determine their own packages on which to bid. In the proxy auction (revelation game) versions, the outcome is a point in the core of the exchange economy for the reported preferences. When payoffs are linear in money...

It is commonly observed that over time and across societies, women tend to marry older men. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that wages increase with age and hence older men are more attractive in the marriage market. The model developed in Chapter 2 of this dissertation shows...

The bank credit card market, containing 4,000 firms and lacking regulatory barriers, casually appears to be a hospitable environment for the model of perfect competition. Nevertheless, this article reports that credit card interest rates have been exceptionally sticky relative to the cost of...

Suppose that a seller and a buyer have private valuations for a good and that their respective utilities from a trading mechanism are given by u(subscript 's') and u(subscript 'b'). Consider the problem of maximizing E[('lambda')u(subscript 's') + (1 - 'lambda')u(subscript 'b')] for some weight...

This paper analyzes durable goods monopoly in an infinite-horizon, discrete-time game. The authors prove that, as the time interval between successive offers approaches zero, all seller payoffs between zero and static monopoly profits are supported by subgame perfect equilibria. This reverses a...

This article reconsiders the durable goods monopoly problem when the monopolist's marginal cost is private information. The authors show that the Coase conjecture implies the no trade theorem: in any equilibrium in which the lowest-cost seller's initial offer approaches her marginal cost, the...

It is often argued that efficiency considerations require society to freely permit insider trading. In this article, an opposing efficiency argument is formalized. The model incorporates an investment stage followed by a trading stage. If "outsiders" expect "insiders" to take advantage of them...

This paper analyzes a class of alternating-offer bargaining games with one-sided incomplete information for the case of "no gap." If sequential equilibria are required to satisfy the additional restrictions of stationarity, monotonicity, pure strategies, and no free screening, the authors...