A good reputation can be an effective bond for honest behavior in a community of traders if members of the community know how others have behaved in the past - even if any particular pair of traders meets only infrequently. In a large community, it would be impossibly costly for traders to be...

When a job-seeker and an employer meet, find a prospective surplus, and bargain over the wage, conditions in the outside labor market, including especially unemployment, may be irrelevant. The job-seeker's threat point in the bargain is to delay bargaining, not to terminate bargaining and resume...

This is an article about modeling methods in information economics. A notion of "favorableness" of news is introduced, characterized, and applied to four simple models. In the equilibria of these models, (1) the arrival of good news about a firm's prospects always causes its share price to rise,...

Book Review

We investigate the conventional wisdom that competition among interested parties attempting to influence a decision maker by providing verifiable information brings out all the relevant information. We find that, if the decision maker is strategically sophisticated and well informed about the...

[eng] Package Bidding Vickrey vs. Ascending Auctions. . The Vickrey and ascending package auctions are found to have identical equilibrium performance in the case where goods are substitutes. In the remaining cases, the Vickrey auction retains its incentive advantages ai the cost of setting...

The Vickrey and ascending package auctions are found to have identical equilibrium performance in the case where goods are substitutes. In the remaining cases, the Vickrey auction retains its incentive advantages at the cost of setting prices that are so low that the outcome is not in the core...

We develop a model of matching with contracts which incorporates, as special cases, the college admissions problem, the Kelso-Crawford labor market matching model, and ascending package auctions. We introduce a new "law of aggregate demand" for the case of discrete heterogeneous workers and show...

We present a signalling model, based on ideas of Phillip Nelson, in which both the introductory price and the level of directly "uninformative" advertising or other dissipative marketing expenditures are choice variables and may be used as signals for the initially unobservable quality of a...