In many markets, consumers have "switching costs" (for example, learning costs or transaction costs) of changing between functionally-equivalent brands of a product, or of using any brand for the first time. The author analyzes a four-period, complete-information model of a market with switching...

We usually assume that increases in supply, allocation by rationing, and exclusion of potential buyers reduce prices. But all these activities raise the expected price in an important set of cases when common-value assets are sold. Furthermore, when we make the assumptions needed to rule out...

The authors model a war of attrition with N+K firms competing for N prizes. In a 'natural oligopoly' context, the K - 1 lowest-value firms drop out instantaneously, even though each firm's value is private information to itself. In a 'standard setting' context, in which every competitor suffers...

Consider firms each selling a range of products, when each consumer prefers to concentrate his purchases with a single supplier because of the `shopping costs' of using additional suppliers. If the firms offer different product ranges, some consumers will nevertheless use multiple suppliers to...

Price controls lead to misallocation of goods and encourage rent seeking. The misallocation effect alone ensures that a price control always reduces consumer surplus in an otherwise-competitive market with convex demand if supply is more elastic than demand or with log-convex demand (e.g.,...

We compare the most common methods for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly: a simple simultaneous auction, and a sequential process in which potential buyers decide in turn whether to enter the bidding. The sequential process is always more efficient. But preemptive...

Today's regulatory rules, especially the easily-manipulated measures of regulatory capital, have led to costly bank failures. We design a robust regulatory system such that (i) bank losses are credibly borne by the private sector (ii) systemically important institutions cannot collapse suddenly;...

We propose a new, easy-to-implement, class of payment rules, “Reference Rules,” to make core-selecting package auctions more robust. Small, almost riskless, profitable deviations from “truthful bidding” are often easy for bidders to find under currently-used payment rules. Reference...

I describe a new static (sealed-bid) auction for multiple substitute goods. As in a two-sided simultaneous multiple round auction (SMRA), bidders bid on multiple assets simultaneously, and bid-takers choose supply functions across assets. The auction yields more efficiency, revenue, information,...

We compare the most common methods for selling a company or other asset when participation is costly: a simple simultaneous auction, and a sequential process in which potential buyers decide in turn whether or not to enter the bidding. The sequential process is always more efficient. But...