This paper studies the optimal selling procedures for a monopolist, when consumers valuations are unknown and there are fixed costs. The fixed costs introduce a positive externality among customers: each customer benefits from the presence of others who help cover the fixed costs. In this...

We identify and investigate the basic ?hold-up? problem which arises whenever each party to a contingent contract has to pay some ex-ante cost for the contract to become feasible. We then proceed to show that, under plausible circumstances, a ?contractual solution? to this hold-up problem is not...

We develop a model of unforeseen contingencies. These are contingencies that are understood by economic agents - their consequences and probabilities are known - but are such that every description of such events necessarily leaves out relevant features that have a non-negligible impact on the...

In this paper the internal organisation of firms is reduced to the organisation of a communication network. In the presence of information communication and processing costs it is important to design rules guiding which members of the firm ought to communicate with one another on a regular...

This paper is a theoretical study into how credit constraints intereact with aggregate economic activity over the business cycle. We construct a model of a dynamic economy in which lenders cannot force borrowers to repay their debts unless the debts are secured. In such an economy, durable...

This paper presents a one-sided incomplete (asymmetric) information bargaining game between a firm and a worker embedded in a general equilibrium framework. The model predicts business cycle fluctuations in the economy in response to changes in aggregate productivity. The employment level in the...

This paper extends the classic two-armed bandit problem to a many-agent setting in which N players each face the same experimentation problem. The difference with the single-agent problem is that agents can now learn from the experiments of others. Thus, experiementation produces a public good...

This paper studies optimal experimentation by a monopolist who faces an unknown demand curve subject to random changes, and who maximises profits over an infinite horizon in continuous time. We show that there are two qualitatively very different regimes, determined by the discount rate and the...