We analyze cross-country trends in technological progress over the period of 1980-2011 by examining citations data from almost 4 million utility patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Oce (USPTO). Our estimation results on patent quality and distance to the knowledge frontier reveal the...

This paper considers a buyer-seller contracting model in which the seller possesses private information about all relevant aspects of the state of nature, including how much each action is worth to the buyer. We argue that, given asymmetric information, the buyer may not entirely dismiss an...

of reputation building converges to a level strictly between 0 and 1. However, the two limiting cases differ in the number of third party signals invoked.

We study experimentally the role of the network structure of pre-play communication in determination of outcome and behavior in a multiplayer coordination game with conflicting preferences. We explore the trade-off between the efficiency and equity of coordination outcomes and its link to the...

Once a contract has been agreed by two agents, the problem of renegotiating breach under two-sided asymmetric information on the agents' outside options is equivalent to the problem of bilateral trade with uncertain gains. Thus, the theorem of Myerson and Satterthwaite (1983) implies the...

In many real world negotiations, from wage contract bargaining to product liability disputes, the bargaining parties often interact repeatedly and have the option of seeking outside judgement. This paper studies a model of repeated bargaining with a third party to analyze how and why bargaining...

This article considers a buyer-seller contracting model in which the seller possesses private information about all relevant aspects of the state of nature, including how much each action is worth to the buyer. I argue that, given asymmetric information, the buyer may not entirely dismiss an...

We study the decision of when to sue in a game in which multiple plaintiffs have similar cases against a single defendant. Two legal regimes are considered. In one, prior results are binding in all future cases. In contrast, under the prevalent asymmetric regime, adverse results are binding...

Even with complete information, two-person bargaining can generate a large number of equilibria, involving disagreements and inefficiencies, in (i) negotiation games where disagreement payoffs are endogenously determined (Busch and Wen, 1995) and (ii) costly bargaining games where there are...

This paper considers the ``negotiation game'' Busch and Wen (1995)) which combines the features of two-person alternating offers bargaining and repeated games. Despite the forces of bargaining, the negotiation game in general admits a large number of equilibria some of which involve delay and...