Given the extremely competitive nature of the current global service industry, the transition from merely satisfying customers to delighting customers has become a strategic objective for many service firms. As previous studies have reported, many service organizations pleasantly surprise their...

This dissertation consists of three essays on games with incomplete information. Among many issues that arise due to information asymmetry, I focus on, and shed some lights on, commitment, reputation, and information transmission. In Chapter 1, I investigate the effects of commitment and...

Assortative Matching between workers and firms provides evidence of the complementarities or substitutes in production. The presence of complementarities is important for policies that aim to achieve the optimal allocation of resources, for example unemployment insurance. We argue that using...

The introduction of firm size into labor search models raises the question how wages are set when average and marginal product differ. We develop and analyze an alternative to the existing bargaining framework: Firms compete for labor by publicly posting long–term contracts. In such a...

We build a theoretical model to study the welfare effects and resulting policy implications of firms’ market power in a frictional labor market. Our environment has two main characteristics: wages play a role in allocating labor across firms and there is a finite number of agents. We find that...

[This item is a preserved copy. To view the original, visit http://econtheory.org/] A key to the Coase conjecture is the monopolist's inability to commit to a price, which leads consumers to believe that a high current price will be followed by low future prices. This paper studies the...

In this paper, we obtain detailed data on road traffic crash (RTC) casualties, by severity, for each of the eight state and territory jurisdictions for Australia and use these to estimate and compare the economic impact of RTCs across these regions. We show that the annual cost of RTCs in...