Many service industries, including the medical and legal professions in some countries, display a gated structure. Rather than approaching a final producer directly, a consumer will first seek a referral from an intermediary. In this paper, we provide one possible explanation for such an...

Many service industries, including the medical and legal professions in some countries, display a gated structure. Rather than approaching a final producer directly, a consumer will first seek a referral from an intermediary. Such an industry structure might help to alleviate adverse selection...

We study non-stationary dynamic decentralized markets with adverse selection in which trade is bilateral and prices are determined by bargaining. Examples include labor markets, housing markets, and markets for financial assets. We characterize equilibrium, and identify the dynamics of...

Asymmetric information is an important source of inefficiency when assets (like firms) are transacted. The two main sources of this asymmetry are unobserved idiosyncratic characteristics of the asset (for example, quality) and unobserved idiosyncratic choices (actions done by the current...

By providing incentives for sellers to act in a trustworthy manner, reputation mechanisms in many online environments can mitigate moral-hazard problems when particular buyers and sellers interact infrequently. However, these mechanisms rely on buyers sharing their private information about...

This paper develops a dynamic theory of war and peace. In our framework, an aggressive country can forcibly extract concessions from a non-aggressive country via war. Alternatively, it can avoid war and allow the non-aggressive country to make concessions on its own. Both countries suffer from...

We allow buyers to choose the timing of offers in a dynamic adverse selection model with a single seller. Buyers have private information and can delay their one-time private offers to learn from other buyers by observing trading behavior. We find that the equilibrium exhibits maximum delay in...

In this paper, we examine a supply chain in which a single supplier sells to a downstream newsvendor-type retailer. We make two assumptions that enrich this simple and well-understood model. First, we consider a multi-period model, in which the sequence of events is as follows. In a period, t,...

We consider a manufacturer selling to a retailer with private demand information arising dynamically over an infinite time horizon. Under a backlogging model, we show that the manufacturer's optimal dynamic long-term contract takes a simple form: in the first period, based on her private demand...

I model access to influence as a two-sided matching market between a continuum of experts and a finite number of gatekeepers under sequential directed search. Real-world examples include academic publishing, venture capitalism or political agenda setting. Uniqueness of the resulting equilibrium...