Under appropriate assumptions (private values and uniform punishments), the Nash equilibria of a Bayesian repeated game without discounting are payoff-equivalent to tractable, completely revealing, equilibria and can be achieved as interim cooperative solutions of the initial Bayesian game. This...

This paper analyses bargaining over an incentive compatible contract in a moral hazard framework. We introduce the Kalai-Smorodinsky bargaining solution and compare the outcome with the commonly applied Nash solution. Whether worker's effort is higher in the Nash or the Kalai-Smorodinsky...

This paper considers competitive search equilibrium in a market for a good whose quality differs across sellers. Each seller knows the quality of the good that he or she is offering for sale, but buyers cannot observe quality directly. We thus have a “market for lemons” with competitive...

This paper explores the private and social benefits from barter exchange in a monetized economy. We first prove a no-trade theorem regarding the ability of firms with double-coincidences-of-wants to negotiate improvements in trade among themselves relative to the market outcomes. We then...

During the recent sales of UMTS licenses in Europe some countries used auctions while others resorted to so-called Beauty Contests. There seems to be a wide consensus among economists that in these and other contexts like privatisation an auction is the better selling mechanism. However, why...

This paper analyzes the effects of taxation on information acquisition and bilateral trade in decentralized markets. We show that a profit tax and a transaction tax have opposite implications for equilibrium outcome in bargaining. A marginal increase of a transaction tax increases the incentive...

Higher education is not just a signal of innate ability. At least a certain level of educational achievement (degree level, degree mark) is strictly required to perform a graduate job. School leavers fall into two categories, the rich and the poor. Ability is distributed in the same way in both...

Human capital theory distinguishes between training in general-usage and firm-specific skills. In his seminal work, Becker (1964) argues that employers will not be willing to invest in general training when labor markets are competitive. However, they are willing to invest in specific training...

We study a strategic model of dynamic trading where agents are asymmetrically informed over common value sources of uncertainty. There is a continuum of buyers and a finite number n of sellers. All buyers are uninformed, while at least one seller is privately informed about the true state of the...

We propose a model based on competitive markets in order to analyse an economy with several principals and agents. We model the principal-agent economy as a two-sided matching game and characterise the set of stable outcomes of this principal-agent matching market. A simple mechanism to...