Contingent ownership structures are prevalent in joint ventures. We offer an explanation based on the investment incentives provided by such an arrangement. We consider a holdup problem in which two parties make relationship-specific investments sequentially to generate a joint surplus in the...

Extreme adverse selection arises when private information has unbounded support, and market breakdown occurs when no trade is the only equilibrium outcome. We study extreme adverse selection via the limit behavior of a financial market as the support of private information converges to an...

With infinite horizon, optimal rules for sequential search from a known distribution feature a constant reservation value that is independent of whether recall of past options is possible. We extend this result to the the case when there are multiple distributions to choose from: it is optimal...

We consider how group size affects the private provision of a public good with non-refundable binary contributions. A fixed amount of the good is provided if and only if the number of contributors reaches an exogenous threshold. The threshold, the group size, and the identical, non-refundable...

Conjugate duality relationships are pervasive in matching and implementation problems and provide much of the structure essential for characterizing stable matches and implementable allocations in models with quasilinear (or transferable) utility. In the absence of quasilinearity, a more...