Several recent papers argue that contracts provide reference points that affect ex post behavior. We test this hypothesis in a canonical buyer-seller relationship with renegotiation. Our paper provides causal experimental evidence that an initial contract has a highly significant and...

I study a directed search model of oligopolistic competition, extended to incorporate general capacity constraints, congestion effects, and pricing based on ex-post realized demand. I show that as long as any one of these ingredients is present, the Bertrand paradox will fail to hold. Hence, I...

In many search models of the labor market, unemployment insurance (UI) is conveniently interpreted as the value of leisure or home production and is, therefore, treated as a parameter. However, in reality, UI has to be funded through taxation that might be distortionary. In this paper, I analyze...

We study a strategic model of dynamic trading where agents are asymmetrically informed over common value sources of uncertainty. There is a continuum of uninformed buyers and a finite number of sellers, some of them informed. When there is only one seller, full information revelation never...

We apply stochastic stability to study the evolution of bidding behavior in private-values second-price, first-price and k-double auctions. The learning process has a strong component of inertia but with a small probability, the bids are modified in the direction of ex-post regrets. We identify...

We propose positive and normative foundations for the average prekernel of NTU games, and compare them with the existing ones for the prekernel. In our non-cooperative analysis, the average prekernel is understood as the equilibrium payoffs of a game where each player faces the possibility of...

This paper is a survey of the work in the Nash program for coalitional games, a research agenda proposed by Nash (1953) to bridge the gap between the non-cooperative and cooperative approaches to game theory.

We show the robustness of the Walrasian result obtained in models of bargaining in pairwise meetings. Restricting trade to take place only in pairs, most of the assumptions made in the literature are dispensed with. These include assumptions on preferences (differentiability, monotonicity,...

We provide a mechanism that approximately implements the Mas-Colell bargaining set in subgame perfect equilibrium. The mechanism is based on the definition of the Mas-Colell bargaining set, and respects feasibility in and out of equilibrium.

This paper considers a frictional market where buyers and sellers, with unit demand and supply, search for trading opportunities. The analysis focuses on explicit search frictions, allows for two-sided incomplete information, and puts no restriction on agent heterogeneity. In this context, a...