A family of ascending package auction models is introduced in which bidders may determine their own packages on which to bid. In the proxy auction (revelation game) versions, the outcome is a point in the core of the exchange economy for the reported preferences. When payoffs are linear in money...

It is often argued that efficiency considerations require society to freely permit insider trading. In this article, an opposing efficiency argument is formalized. The model incorporates an investment stage followed by a trading stage. If "outsiders" expect "insiders" to take advantage of them...

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 a class of alternating-offer bargaining games with one-sided incomplete information for the case of "no gap." If sequential equilibria are required to satisfy the additional restrictions of stationarity, monotonicity, pure strategies, and no free screening, the authors...

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...

This article reconsiders the durable goods monopoly problem when the monopolist's marginal cost is private information. The authors show that the Coase conjecture implies the no trade theorem: in any equilibrium in which the lowest-cost seller's initial offer approaches her marginal cost, the...

Abstract We analyze a data set containing rental revenues, maintenance costs, and sale prices of five different types of rental machines to econometrically estimate key relationships needed to implement a dynamic programming model of the optimal timing of replacement of rental equipment owned by...

This essay reviews Kenneth I. Wolpin's (2013) monograph The Limits of Inference without Theory, which arose from lectures he presented at the Cowles Foundation in 2010 in honor of Tjalling Koopmans. While I readily agree with Wolpin's basic premise that empirical work that eschews the role of...