Efficient employment contracts usually fail to compensate workers for the effects of posthir ing events and decisions when changing jobs is costly. Then, when the re are executives and managers with authority to make discretionary decisions, affected employees will be led to waste valuable time...

Does consumer behavior exhibit time inconsistency? This is an essential, yet difficult question to answer. This dissertation attempts to answer this question based on a large-scale randomized experiment in the credit card market. Specifically,we apply both time consistent preferences...

It is commonly observed that over time and across societies, women tend to marry older men. The traditional explanation for this phenomenon is that wages increase with age and hence older men are more attractive in the marriage market. The model developed in Chapter 2 of this dissertation shows...

The bank credit card market, containing 4,000 firms and lacking regulatory barriers, casually appears to be a hospitable environment for the model of perfect competition. Nevertheless, this article reports that credit card interest rates have been exceptionally sticky relative to the cost of...

Suppose that a seller and a buyer have private valuations for a good and that their respective utilities from a trading mechanism are given by u(subscript 's') and u(subscript 'b'). Consider the problem of maximizing E[('lambda')u(subscript 's') + (1 - 'lambda')u(subscript 'b')] for some weight...

This paper analyzes durable goods monopoly in an infinite-horizon, discrete-time game. The authors prove that, as the time interval between successive offers approaches zero, all seller payoffs between zero and static monopoly profits are supported by subgame perfect equilibria. This reverses a...