When agents with private information compete for resources from an uninformed decision-maker and are biased towards their own favored projects (e.g., a CEO decides which division manager’s project to fund), they have incentive to strategically communicate about their project’s value....

In some markets consumers seek exclusive consumption experiences, yet in these markets businesses sometimes market their goods widely and at low prices during an introduction period. We use a two-period game-theoretic model to provide a signaling explanation for this phenomenon. In our model,...

This paper explores the strategic tradeoff between advertising and pricing when firms have asymmetric loyal market segments and also can compete for shoppers who purchase at the lowest advertised price. Two advertising structures consistent with real world settings are considered. In the first...

The nature of manufacturer's suggested retail prices (MSRPs) and whether their effect is pro- or anticompetitive is not well understood. We exploit a policy experiment in which a ban on MSRPs was imposed and then lifted a year later. We show that average prices increased by 2.1 percent as a...

A consumer with unit demand sequentially visits sellers of competing products for which her private values are uncertain. She can learn each value at a cost or purchase any of the products without learning. Each seller optimally sets either a "regular" price which induces a visiting consumer to...

To overcome the no-trade theorems due to Aumann (1976) and others, models of speculative trade have relied on agents that do not maximize expected wealth (noise traders). We develop an overlapping generations model in which rational wealth-maximizing speculators with a common prior trade a...