We examine a linear city duopoly where firms choose their locations to maximize expected profits, uncertain about how consumers will assess the relative quality of their products. Equilibrium locations depend on the ratio of the expected quality superiority to the strength of horizontal...

Consider a market where an informed monopolist sets the price for a good or asset with a value unknown to potential buyers. Upon observing the price, buyers may pay some cost for information about the value before deciding on purchases. To restrict buyer beliefs we generalize the idea of the...

Motivated by the regulatory debate in electricity markets, we seek to understand how market design affects market performance through its impact on investment incentives. For this purpose, we study a two-stage game in which firms choose their capacities under demand uncertainty prior to bidding...

We survey the literature analysing the price formation and trading process, and the consequences of market organization for price discovery and welfare. We develop a united perspective on theoretical, empirical and experimental approaches. We discuss the evidence on transaction costs and the...

This paper uses data consisting of students' strategically reported preferences and their underlying true preferences to study the course allocation mechanism used at Harvard Business School. We show that the mechanism is manipulable in theory, manipulated in practice, and that these...

Evidence suggests that unemployed individuals can sometimes affect their job prospects by undertaking a costly action like deciding to move or retrain. Realistically, such an opportunity only arises for some individuals and the identity of those may be unobservable ex-ante. The problem of...

We consider a competitive search model where firms with vacancies choose between posting a wage ex-ante and bargaining it with workers ex-post. Workers apply for vacancies after observing firms' wage setting decisions, and differ in some observable but not verifiable qualifications that affect...

Information asymmetries are important in theory but difficult to identify in practice. We estimate the presence and importance of adverse selection and moral hazard in a consumer credit market using a new field experiment methodology. We randomized 58,000 direct mail offers issued by a major...

We analyze a game of two-sided private information characterized by extreme adverse selection, and study a special case in the laboratory. Each player has a privately known "strength" and can decide to fight or compromise. If either chooses to fight, there is a conflict; the stronger player...

What are the welfare effects of a policy that facilitates for insurance customers to privately and covertly learn about their accident risks? We endogenize the information structure in Stiglitz's classic monopoly insurance model. We first show that his results are robust: For a small information...