We investigate the widely-used rank-order mechanism for displaying user-generated content, where contributions are displayed on a webpage in decreasing order of their ratings, in a game-theoretic model where strategic contributors benefit from attention and have a cost to quality. We show that...

Since its early days, the Internet has been used by the music industry as a powerful marketing tool to promote artists and their products. Nevertheless, technology developments of the past ten years, and especially the ever-growing phenomenon of file sharing, have created the general impression...

Asymmetric information refers to that uncertainty which arises as a result of co-ordination problems between two agents. This has a limited applicability in the understanding of how businessmen attempt to protect themselves against the possible fluctuation in macro-economic variables and from a...

In the last years, many contributions have been exploring population learning in economies where myopic agents play bilateral games and are allowed to repeatedly choose their pure strategies in the game and, possibly, their opponents in the game. These models explore bilateral stage-games...

For perfectly competitive economies under uncertainty, there is a well-known equivalence between a formulation with contingent goods and one with state-specific securities followed by spot markets for goods. In this paper, I examine whether this equivalence carries over to a particular form of...

The actions of different agents sometimes reinforce each other. Examples are network effects and the threshold models used by sociologists as well as Harvey Leibensteins's "bandwagon effects." We model such situations as a game with increasing differences, and show that tipping of equilibria,...

This paper creates a game theoretic model to determine how pendulum arbitration or baseball arbitration impacts the incentives of litigants. Pendulum arbitration is when both parties submit competing proposals and the arbitrator chooses only one of the bids, in its entirety, to be binding on...

This paper develops necessary and sufficient conditions for monotone comparative statics predictions in several classes of stochastic optimization problems. The results are formulated so as to highlight the tradeoffs between assumptions about payoff functions and assumptions about probability...

We experimentally examine the effects of flexible and fixed prices in markets for experience goods in which demand is driven by trust. With flexible prices, we observe low prices and high quality in competitive (oligopolistic) markets, and high prices coupled with low quality in non-competitive...

Abstract. In institutional studies various concepts and terms have been proposed to describe institutional phenomena and their nature. They include behavioral regularity, habituation, collective intentionality, common knowledge, shared beliefs, artifacts, rules of the game, system of signs, and...