Consumers purchase conspicuous goods to satisfy not only material needs but also social needs such as prestige. In an attempt to meet these social needs, producers of conspicuous goods like cars, perfumes, and watches, highlight the exclusivity of their products. In this paper, we propose a...

Market games constitute a class of cooperative n-person games with sidepayments in which several coalitions may form simultaneously. In order to study coalition forming behavior in such games and to test the descriptive power of four major solution concepts that yield differing prescriptions for...

The personal video recorder (PVR) facilitates the use of targeted advertising by allowing companies to monitor television viewing behavior and to build demographic profiles of viewers from the data that are collected. Our research explores the extent to which an advertiser should allocate...

We study a multiperiod bargaining mechanism in which a seller negotiates with a buyer over the price of an indivisible good. It is common knowledge that the good has zero value to the seller. Its value to the buyer is privately known, distributed independently of the seller's value according to...

Differences in players' skill are important determinants of relative player success in most real games such as poker, chess, basketball, business, and politics. Yet conventional game theory has concentrated primarily on games with no skill differences among players. This paper uses a simplified...

We model the effect of contract parameters such as price rebates and after-sales warranty costs on the choice of quality by a supplier, the inspection policy of a producer, and the resulting end product quality. Both noncooperative and cooperative settings are explored. The paper's contribution...

In this paper, we investigate project selection choices of duopolists facing two alternatives: undertaking a "pioneering" type project (Type A) aimed to develop a highly innovative product, or an "incremental innovation" type project (Type B) aimed to develop a less innovative product such as...

This note reconsiders some of the issues raised by Kadane and Larkey, and Harsanyi, and briefly discusses some relevant empirical results.

A new procedure is proposed for settling disputes which combines binding arbitration (BA) and final-offer arbitration (FOA). Unlike either of the two pure procedures, combined arbitration (CA) induces the two parties to converge in making their final offers. Under BA, the arbitrator's settlement...

We examine the buyer's problem of inducing the supplier's quality effort using two arrangements: the appraisal regime and the certification regime. In the appraisal regime, the buyer inspects the units supplied and either charges a penalty for defective units identified during inspection or pays...