This paper explores how a seller should transmit product information to bidders with horizontally differentiated preferences. Under cheap-talk, we show that, in an informative equilibrium, the seller provides less precise information for more popular product attributes. Second, for any given...

We study the effects of corruption on equilibrium competition and social welfare in a first-price public procurement auction. In our model, firms are invited into the auction at positive costs, and a bureaucrat runs the auction on behalf of a government, who may request a bribe from the winning...

This paper studies the degrees of equilibrium competition in three common forms of auctions with costly participation, and shows that, when bidders' valuation distribution is concave, there is a simple condition to rank the equilibrium competition of those auctions. It also investigates how the...

This paper develops a tractable framework for analyzing compound search problems, where a searcher chooses search intensity adaptively in each period. We fully characterize the optimal search rule and value, decomposing the inter-temporal change of search intensity into the fall-back value...

What determines the dynamic patterns of local public investment in authoritarian countries? We analyze a unique dataset that matches public-private partnership (PPP) projects with Chinese mayors who served from 2010 to 2017, and document a robust tenure effect in public investment. Mayors...

A seller wants to allocate an indivisible product among a number of potential bidders by a finite deadline, and to contact a bidder, she needs to incur a search cost. We show that the seller's optimal search outcomes can be implemented by a sequential search auction, which is characterized by...