The housing rental market offers a unique laboratory for studying price stickiness. This paper is motivated by two facts: 1. Tenants' rents are remarkably sticky even though regular and expected recontracting would, by itself, suggest substantial rent flexibility. 2. Rent stickiness varies...

We study how the presence of a monthly revenue-based quota impacts a retailer's profits when prices are negotiated by a salesperson. Utilizing transaction level data for refrigerators, we first provide reduced form evidence that prices are impacted by the quota: the negotiated discounts are...

Retailers routinely allow consumers to negotiate a discount off the posted price, especially for big ticket items such as home appliances, furniture, automobiles, and real estate, as well as on online platforms such as Amazon, eBay and Alibaba. The profitability of such a strategy, relative to...

In many settings where pricing is delegated to salespeople, firms provide the salespeople incentives to not only sell more, but also to do so at higher prices. In this paper, we study the relative importance of pricing-focused and revenue-focused incentives, and quantify the profitability of...

Inventors and producers bargain over royalties to license multiple patented inventions. In the first stage of the bargaining game, inventors offer licenses to producers and producers demand licenses. In the second stage of the game, inventors and producers engage in bilateral bargaining over...

This paper presents a model of strategic buyer-seller networks with information exchange between sellers. Prior to engaging in bargaining with buyers, sellers can share access to buyers for a negotiated transfer. We study how this information exchange affects overall market prices, volumes and...

Rational economic agents always engage in maximizing their payoffs. The endeavor in this paper is to show that when the parties involved in the bargaining process (game) have similar discount factors and when the number of periods of the game tends to infinity or very large, then the surplus is...

Conventional wisdom says that economic surplus is created when the cost of litigation is foregone in favor of settlement, a theory flowing from the Coase Theorem. The cost-benefit analysis weighs settlement against the expected value of litigation net of transaction cost. This calculus yields...

Prior research on "strategic voting" has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...

When will a landlord prefer to supply both land and credit to a tenant rather than allow the lender to borrow from a separate moneylender? The paper shows that if tenancy contracts are obtained prior to contracting with the moneylender, and the tenant has limited liability, interlinked deals...