We characterize an optimal mechanism for a seller with one unit of a good facing N ≥ 3 buyers and a single competitor who sells another identical unit in a second-price auction. Buyers who do not get the seller's good compete in the competitor's subsequent auction. The mechanism features...

This paper was written as an editorial preface to a "Symposium on Relational Contracts", that was jointly edited by the three authors, and that will appear in the Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics (JITE). The Symposium contains eleven contributions to the economics of relational...

When procurement contracts are awarded through competitive tendering participating firms commit ex ante to fulfil a set of contractual duties. However, selected contractors may find profitable to renege ex post on their promises by opportunistically delivering lower quality standards. In order...

We study a communication game between an informed sender and an uninformed receiver with repeated interactions and voluntary transfers. Transfers motivate the receiver's decision-making and signal the sender's information. Although full separation can always be supported in equilibrium, partial...

I study reputation models in which information about the long-run player's past behavior is dispersed among short-run players. I identify two challenges to reputation building when such information is aggregated via the short-run players' actions. First, when the long-run player's action can...

Students participating in centralized admissions procedures do not typically have access to the information used to determine their matched school, such as other students' preferences or school priorities. This can lead to doubts about whether their matched schools were computed correctly (the...

We relax the common assumption of homogeneous beliefs in principal-agent relationships with adverse selection. Principals are competitors in the product market and write contracts also on the base of an expected aggregate. The model is a version of a cobweb model. In an evolutionary learning...

This paper studies repeated trade with noisy information about previous transactions. A buyer has private information about his willingness to pay, which is either low or high, and buys goods from different sellers over time. Each seller observes a noisy history of signals about the buyer's...

I study sequential contests where the efforts of earlier players may be disclosed to later players by nature or by design. The model has many applications, including rent seeking, R&D, oligopoly, public goods provision, and tragedy of the commons. I show that information about other players'...

We study the interaction of incentives to free-ride on information acquisition and strategically delay irreversible investment in environments in which multiple firms evaluate an investment opportunity. In our model, two firms decide how quickly to privately obtain information about the...