We study monopoly pricing of overlapping generations of a durable good. We consider two sorts of goods: those with an active secondhand market and anonymous consumers, such as textbooks, and those with no secondhand market and consumers who can prove that they purchased the old good to qualify...

There has been a recent surge of interest in open source software development, which involves developers at many different locations and organizations sharing code to develop and refine programs. To an economist, the behavior of individual programmers and commercial companies engaged in open...

The paper explores strategies that the sponsor of a proposal may employ to convince a qualified majority of members in a group to approve the proposal. Adopting a mechanism design approach to communication, it emphasizes the need to distill information selectively to key group members and to...

Owners of intellectual property or mere sponsors of an idea (e.g., authors, security issuers, sponsors of standards) resort to more or less independent certifiers to persuade potential users (buyers or adopters) of the worth of their property or idea. We analyze the sponsor?s choices of...

Many incentives in organizations arise not through explicit formal incentive contracts but rather implicitly through career concerns. This paper models career concerns through agents trying to manipulate the market assessment of their future productivity. The information flow from current...

The paper is a first attempt at modeling the idea of group reputation as an aggregate of individual reputations. A member's current incentives are affected by his past behavior and, because his track record is observed only with noise, by the group's past behavior as well. The paper thus studies...

As was shown by M. Dewatripont (1986), optimal long-term contracts under asymmetric information are generally not time-consistent. This paper fully characterizes the equilibrium of a two-period procurement model with commitment and renegotiation. It also analyzes whether renegotiated long-term...

Consider a long-term relationship between a seller and buyer whose valuation (for a durable good) is private. As trade progresses, the valuation will be partially revealed and it may be possible for the parties to commit ex ante not to take advantage of this. The authors analyze this first by...