Prior to the announcement of a tender offer, the bidding firm is legally allowed to acquire shares in the open market, subject to some limitations. These pre-announcement purchases are known as toeholds. This paper presents a simple model that describes the bidder's optimal toehold acquisition strategy, within an environment that closely parallels the present legal institutions. The model shows...

When several models are proposed for one and the same process, experimental design techniques are available to design optimal discriminatory experiments. However, because the experimental design techniques are model-based, it is important that the required model predictions are not too uncertain. This uncertainty is determined by the quality of the already available data, since low-quality data...

Disentangling the relative roles of males, females and their interactive effects on competitive fertilization success remains a challenge in sperm competition. In this study, we apply a novel experimental framework to an ideally suited externally fertilizing model system in order to delineate these roles. We focus on the chinook salmon, Oncorhynchus tshawytscha, a species in which ovarian fluid...

A revenue-maximizing monopolist is selling a single indivisible good to buyers who face a loss if a rival buyer obtains it. The rivalry is modeled through a network, an arc between a pair of buyers indicates that a buyer considers another buyer its rival, and the magnitude of the loss is the private information of each buyer. First, given a network, we characterize the optimal mechanism. Second...

We model a duopoly in which ex-ante identical firms must decide where to direct their innovation efforts. The firms face market uncertainty about consumers’ preferences for innovation on two product attributes, and technology uncertainty about the success of their R&D investments. Firms can conduct costly market research before setting R&D strategy. We find that the value of market information ...