We consider a seller who can propose any selling mechanism to a buyer. The seller’s reservation value and the buyer’s valuation can depend both on the buyer’s privatelyknown taste and on product characteristics privately-known to the seller. Product information is voluntarily and costlessly certifiable by the seller. We characterize all feasible allocations under any certifiability structure an...

An auction with a buyout option occurring over continuous time with rules similar to eBay’s “buy it now” option is analyzed. It is shown that a risk averse seller facing risk neutral bidders will choose a buyout price low enough so that the buyout option is exercised with positive probability in equilibrium. Further, when the seller is risk averse and bidders are risk neutral, allowing the sell...

We study a dynamic buyer-seller problem in which the good is information and there are no property rights. The potential buyer is reluctant to pay for information whose value to him is uncertain, but the seller cannot credibly convey its value to the buyer without disclosing the information itself. Information comes as divisible hard evidence. We show how and why the seller can appropriate a su...

A buyer wishes to purchase a good from a seller who chooses a sequence of prices over time. Each period the buyer can also exercise an outside option, abandoning their search or moving on to another seller. We show there is a unique equilibrium in which the seller charges a constant price in every period equal to the monopoly price, contravening the Coase conjecture. We then embed the singlesel...

In most markets, buyers differ in their ability or willingness to switch supplier. This note proposes a novel industry concentration measure that takes this heterogeneity into account. The index increases the share of captive sales, coincides with Hirschman–Herfindahl Index when none are captive, and ”pure monopoly” value 1 all captive.

Our research proposes a simple game model that captures the incentives dictating the interaction between buyers and sellers and reveals the strategies that evolve in different scenarios, such as eBay auctions. In particular, we find seller history has a significant effect on player strategy. We prove that for simple reputation-based buyer strategies, a seller’s decision whether to cheat or not ...

Buyer-seller watermarking are protocols guaranteeing the buyer prevents false infringement accusations and the seller protects the watermark secrets from the buyer. Most recently, Chang et al. proposed an efficient and fair buyer-seller watermarking scheme for large scale networks quite recently. In this correspondence, we first shows its three weaknesses: the buyer can easily remove the waterm...