Firms often augment career concerns incentives with implicit incentive contracts. I formalize the interaction between these two incentives, and highlight its implications on a firm's decision to disclose its workers' productivity information. Disclosure enhances career concerns but inhibits...

We present an analysis of competition under asymmetric information where prices react asymmetrically to changes in firms' marginal costs. When one firm has private information about some customers, an increase in an uninformed firm's marginal cost leads to a price increase, as usual. However, an...

A consumer's demand for a durable good is governed not only by his individual preferences but also by preferences of other market participants. This interdependence of preferences arises from the inevitable resale of durable goods. If most people prefer goods with certain features, original...

Price controls create opportunities for international arbitrage. Many have argued that such arbitrage, if tolerated, will undermine intellectual property rights and dull the incentives for investment in research-intensive industries such as pharmaceuticals. We challenge this orthodox view and...

This article describes a household production model in which energy-efficient durable goods cost less to operate so households may use them more. The model is estimated using household-level data from a field trial in which participants received high-efficiency clothes washers free of charge....

This article incorporates an information structure with partial information into the canonical hold-up problem. The optimal information structure balances the tradeoff between ex ante efficiency (the information rent effect) and ex post efficiency (the bargaining disagreement effect). With...

We analyze admission and discharge decisions when hospitals become capacity constrained on high-demand days, and develop a test for discrimination that, under certain circumstances, does not require controls for differences across patient groups. On high-demand days, patients are discharged...

We examine a model of contracting where parties interact repeatedly and can contract at any point in time, but writing formal contracts is costly. A contract can describe the external environment and the parties' behavior in a more or less detailed way, and the cost of writing a contract is...

We analyze a dynamic second-price auction with an informed bidder and an uninformed bidder who, upon seeing a posted price, learns whether his valuation is above that price. In the essentially unique equilibrium, an informed bidder bids in the first period if her valuation is below some cutoff...

I examine optimal incentives and performance measurement in a model where an agent has specific knowledge (in the sense of Jensen and Meckling) about the consequences of his actions for the principal. Contracts can be based both on input measures related to the agent's actions and an output...