Electronic intermediaries have become pervasive in sales transactions for many durables, such as cars, power tools, and apartments. Yet only recently have they successfully tackled the challenge of enabling parties to share such goods. A key impediment to sharing is a lender's concern about...

We examine a generic three-stage game for two players with alternating moves, where the first player can choose the level of adjustment cost to be paid in the last period for modifying the action she announced in the first period. In the resulting continuum of commitment options, convexifying...

This paper considers inter-mediation in a differentiated short-term housing market where heterogeneous agents may stay at a hotel or at one of several private hosts' properties, below or above hotel quality. The collaborative-housing market fails when agents' hidden actions are non-contractable....

The internal rate of return (IRR) is generally considered inferior to the net present value (NPV) as a tool for evaluating and ranking projects, despite its inherently useful comparability to the cost of capital and the return of other investment opportunities. We introduce the "selective IRR,"...

We provide a technique for constructing optimal multiattribute screening contracts in a general setting with one-dimensional types based on necessary optimality conditions. Our approach allows for type-dependent participation constraints and arbitrary risk profiles. As an example we discuss...

To aid in the description and estimation of the tremendous recent growth in the collaborative economy, we provide a model for the dynamics of sharing, subject to fixed costs and imperfect price formation. The sharing economy comprises a set of infinitely lived, heterogeneous suppliers, who take...

Newcomb's problem is viewed as a dynamic game with an agent and a superior being as players. Depending on whether or not a risk-neutral agent's confidence in the superior being, as measured by a subjective probability assigned to the move order, exceeds a threshold or not, one obtains the...

This paper introduces a dynamic model of the stochastic repayment behavior exhibited by delinquent credit-card accounts. Based on this model, we construct a dynamic collectability score (DCS) which estimates the account-specific probability of collecting a given portion of the outstanding debt...

We consider a general screening model with payoff externalities and type-dependent feasibility constraints. The principal can design contract instruments of arbitrary dimension to influence each agent's valuation of the proposed transaction, which also depends on the anticipated choice of other...