When individuals trade with strangers, there is a temptation to renege on agreements. If repeated interaction or exogenous enforcement are unavailable, societies often solve this problem via institutions that rely on group, rather than individual, reputation. Groups can employ two mechanisms to...

Conflict and competition often impose costs on both winners and losers, and conflicting parties may prefer to resolve the dispute before it occurs. The equilibrium of a conflict game with side-payments predicts that with binding offers, proposers make and responders accept side-payments,...

Recent research suggests that auction winners sometimes fall prey to a "bidder's curse", paying more for an item at auction than they would have paid at a posted price. One explanation for this phenomenon is that bidders are inattentive to posted prices. We develop a model in which bidders'...