It has been shown that a monopolist can use advance selling to increase profits. This paper documents that this may not hold when a firm faces competition. With advance selling a firm offers its service in an advance period, before consumers know their valuations for the firms’ services, or later on in a spot period, when consumers know their valuations. We identify two ways in which competitio...

Recent turmoil on global financial markets has led to a discussion on which policy measures should or could be taken to stabilize financial markets. One such a measure that resurfaced is the imposition of short-selling constraints. It is conjectured that these shortselling constraints reduce speculative trading and thereby have the potential to stabilize volatile financial markets. The purpose ...

In clock games, agents receive differently-timed private signals when an asset value is above its fundamental. The price crashes to the fundamental when K of N agents have decided to sell. If selling decisions are private, bubbles can be sustained because people delay selling, after receiving signals, knowing that others will delay too. Our results replicate the main features of the one previou...