This paper analyzes the effects of buyer search costs and incomplete information, private and common knowledge of the sellers, on seller competition. It turns out that small changes in search costs may have large but quantifiable effects on pricing when the seller has good private knowledge about the buyer, but the common knowledge of the buyer valuations is lacking among the sellers. As an app...

In our paper targets, by setting a reserve price, screen acquirers on their (expected) ability to generate merger-specific synergies. Both empirical evidence and many common merger models suggest that the difference between highand low-synergy mergers becomes smaller during booms. This implies that the target’s opportunity cost for sorting out relatively less fitting acquirers increases and, he...

A modern, decision-theoretic framework can help clarify important practical questions of experimental design. Building on our recent work, this chapter begins by summarizing our framework for understanding the goals of experimenters, and applying this to re-randomization. We then use this framework to shed light on questions related to experimental registries, pre-analysis plans, and most impor...

We investigate to what extent genuine social preferences can explain observed other-regarding behavior. In a dictator game variant subjects can choose whether to learn about the consequences of their choice for the receiver. We find that a majority of subjects showing other-regarding behavior when the payoffs of the receiver are known, choose to ignore these consequences if possible. This behav...

A New Framework for the Analysis of Inequality This paper presents a new framework for analyzing inequality that moves beyond the anonymity postulate. We estimate the determinants of sectoral choice and the joint distributions of outcomes across sectors. We determine which components of realized earnings variability are due to uncertainty and which components are due to components of human dive...

Define the riskiness of a gamble as the reciprocal of the absolute risk aversion (ARA) of an individual with constant ARA who is indifferent between taking and not taking that gamble. We characterize this index by axioms, chief among them a “duality” axiom which, roughly speaking, asserts that less risk-averse individuals accept riskier gambles. The index is homogeneous of degree 1, monotonic w...

A discrete public good is provided when total contributions exceed the contribution threshold. I show that for a large class of threshold probability distributions, an increase in threshold uncertainty by 2nd-order stochastic dominance will increase (decrease) equilibrium contributions when the public good value is su ciently high (low). In an experiment designed to test these predictions, beha...

Rational expectations solutions are usually derived by assuming that all state variables relevant to forward-looking behaviour are directly observable, or that they are "...an invertible function of observables" (Mehra and Prescott, 1980). Using a framework that nests linearised DSGE models, we give a number of results useful for the analysis of linear rational expectations models with restrict...

We analyze the value of public information in a competitive endowment economy. We provide a global result that an early release of information about the future state of the economy is desired by all agents, or Pareto improving, if agents disagree about the prospect of the economy and asset markets are complete. We further prove that for certain levels of agents’ disagreement, all agents prefer ...

We investigate the outcome of bargaining when a player’s pay-off from agreement is risky. We find that a risk-averse player typically increases his equilibrium receipts when his pay-off is made risky. This is because the presence of risk makes individuals behave “more patiently” in bargaining. Strong analogies are drawn to the precautionary saving literature. We show that the effect of risk on ...