In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller will take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the seller...

In a market in which sellers compete for heterogeneous buyers by posting mechanisms, we analyze how the properties of the meeting technology affect the allocation of buyers to sellers. We show that a separate submarket for each type of buyer is the efficient outcome if and only if meetings are...

We study markets for perishable goods with search frictions. Sellers have a single unit of a good and post prices in every period. Buyers engage in costly search to observe prices and match values. In equilibrium trade starts endogenously and the volume of trade increases over time. Under mild...

The Babylonian bridal auction, described by Herodotus, is regarded as one of the earliest uses of an auction in history. Yet, to our knowledge, the literature lacks a formal equilibrium analysis of this auction. We provide such an analysis for the two-player case with complete and incomplete...

The ex ante incentive compatible core of an exchange economy with private information is the (standard) core of a socially designed characteristic function, which expresses the fact that coalitions allocate goods by means of random incentive compatible mechanisms. We first survey some results in...

We study a general static noisy rational expectations model, where investors have private information about asset payoffs, with common and private components, and about their own exposure to an aggregate risk factor, and derive conditions for existence and uniqueness (or multiplicity) of...

DSGE-models have become important tools of analysis not only in academia but increasingly in the board rooms of central banks. The success of these models has much to do with the coherence of the intellectual framework it provides. The limitations of these models come from the fact that they...

We propose a theoretical explanation for the so-called “beauty premium”. Our approach relies entirely on search frictions and the fact that physical appearance plays an important role in attracting a marriage partner. We analyse the interaction between frictional labour and marriage markets,...

Channel systems for conducting monetary policy are becoming increasingly popular. Despite its popularity, the consequences of implementing policy with a channel system are not well understood. The authors develop a general equilibrium framework of a channel system and study the optimal policy. A...