We extend Akerlof (1970)’s “Market for Lemons†by assuming that some buyers are overconfident. Buyers in our model receive a noisy signal about the quality of the good that is on display for sale. Overconfident buyers do not update according to Bayes’ rule but take the...

We provide several generalizations of Mailath's (1987) result that in games of asymmetric information with a continuum of types incentive compatibility plus separation implies differentiability of the informed agent's strategy. The new results extend the theory to classic models in finance such...

The paper studies a model of delegated search. The distribution of search revenues is unknown to the principal and has to be elicited from the agent in order to design the optimal search policy. At the same time, the search process is unobservable, requiring search to be self-enforcing. The two...

Lecture on the first SFB/TR 15 meeting, Gummersbach, July, 18 - 20, 2004This paper provides an analytical framework for studying principal-agent problems with adverse selection and limited commitment. By allowing the principal to use noisy communication we solve two fundamental problems of...

This paper considers a firm whose potential employees have private information on both their productivity and the extent of their fairness concerns. Fairness is modelled as inequity aversion, where fair-minded workers suffer if their colleagues get more income net of production costs. Screening...

Inter-firm R&D collaborations through contractual arrangements have become increasingly popular, but in many cases they are broken up without any joint discovery. We provide a rationale for the breakup date in R&D collaboration agreements. More specifically, we consider a research consortium...

We analyze the use of information in a repeated oligopolistic insurance market. To sustain collusion, insurance companies might refrain from changing their pricing schedules even if new information about risks becomes available. We therefore provide an explanation for the existence of "unused...

This paper develops a model of successive oligopolies with endogenous market entry, allowing for varying degrees of product differentiation and entry costs in both markets. Our analysis shows that the downstream conditions dominate the overall profitability of the two-tier structure while the...

We consider optimal pricing by a profit-maximizing platform running a dynamic search and matching market. Buyers and sellers enter in cohorts over time, meet and bargain under private information. The optimal centralized mechanism, which involves posting a bid-ask spread, can be decentralized...

We investigate regulation as the outcome of a bargaining process between a regulator and a regulated firm. The regulator is required to monitor the firm’s costs and reveal its information to a political principal (Congress). In this setting, we explore the scope for collusion between the...