We develop a nonparametric approach to test for monotone behavior in optimizing agents and to make out-of-sample predictions. Our approach could be applied to simultaneous games with ordered actions, with agents playing pure strategy Nash equilibria or Bayesian Nash equilibria. We require no...

Retailers routinely allow consumers to negotiate a discount off the posted price, especially for big ticket items such as home appliances, furniture, automobiles, and real estate, as well as on online platforms such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba. The profitability of such a strategy, relative to...

One of the most famous and outstanding formalizations of the Coase Conjecture is that by Gul, Sonnenschein, and Wilson (1986). A peculiarity of their model — as well as all other examinations of the Coase Conjecture of which I am aware, including that by Coase himself — is that it assumes...

In multi-round elimination tournaments, players experience "psychological momentum". We re-consider the design of elimination tournament plan, by taking into account of various types of psychological momentum. The results show that if there is negative psychological momentum, either persistent...

We analyze a model in which agents make investments and then match into pairs to create a surplus. The agents can make transfers to reallocate their pretransfer ownership claims on the surplus. Mailath, Postlewaite and Samuelson (2013) showed that when investments are unobservable, equilibrium...

We study how the presence of a monthly revenue-based quota impacts a retailer's profits when prices are negotiated by a salesperson. Utilizing transaction level data for refrigerators, we first provide reduced form evidence that prices are impacted by the quota: the negotiated discounts are...

We investigate the relationship between competition and stage specialization in the venture capital (VC) market. A typical successful company goes through multiple stages of VC investments, but an average VC firm specializes and participates only in a subset of these stages. We hypothesize that...

The gold spot price is fixed by four banks every day at 10:30 am and 3 pm London time. This document describes a role-play simulation that replicates core features of the London gold fixing with the aim to better understand the incentives and the behaviour of the fixing participants. The game is...

We study a duopoly where the two price setting firms have symmetric information. The firms produce substitute goods with a state dependent common value. The information that is available to both firms about the unknown state of nature is also available to the consumers, who also have access to...