Manufacturers often engage in practices that impede consumer search. Examples include proliferating product varieties, imposing vertical informational restraints, and banning online sales to make it more difficult for consumers to compare prices. This paper models vertical bargaining over...

Critics of plea bargaining have long contended that it has an innocence problem - that the imbalanced and coercive nature of plea negotiations can induce even innocent defendants to plead guilty. While laboratory studies confirm that innocent individuals can indeed be induced to plead guilty,...

Uncertainty may exist about the desirability of trade in bilateral bargaining. For instance, buyers may not know their value perfectly and sellers may not be fully aware of their cost structure. We endogenize the expected surplus of trade by considering information gathering before price...

Bargaining breakdown—whether as delay, conflict, or missing trade—plagues bargaining in environments with incomplete information. Can a bargaining environment that facilitates or restricts communication alleviate these costs? We exploit a unique opportunity to study this question using real...

We present a version of Baliga and Sjöström’s (2012a) conflict games with two asymmetric players. The players contemplate whether to take an active engagement action to compel the leader of a neighboring state (an extremist) to give up his risky weapons. We show that a player with greater...

We analyze the welfare implications of introducing budget rules, composed by a tax code and an entitlement program, in a dynamic infinite horizon political-economy model featuring disagreement over the distribution of resources. Poor agents want expansive entitlement programs, whereas rich...

We study the optimal long-term care policy when informal care can be provided by children in exchange for monetary transfers by their elderly parents. We consider a bargaining model with single-child families. Daughters have a lower labor market wage and a lower bargaining power within the...