The US housing market exhibits seasonal boom and bust cycles where prices and the speed of trade (turnover rate) rise in summers and fall in winters. We present a search model that analytically generates the observed cycles. The proposed mechanism is based on swings in market thickness rather...

We endogenize the trading mechanism selection in a model of directed search with risk averse buyers and show that the unique symmetric equilibrium entails all sellers using fixed price trading. Mechanisms that prescribe the sale price as a function of the realized demand (auctions, bargaining,...

In an experiment, a group of strangers was randomly divided in pairs to play a prisoners’ dilemma; this process was indefinitely repeated. Cooperation did not increase when subjects could send public messages amounting to binding promises of future play.

We study a decentralized trading model as in Peters (1984a), where heterogeneous market participants face a trade-off between price and trade probability. We present a novel proof of existence of a unique demand vector in Nash equilibrium, based on a recursive approach that exploits the...