This article offers a dynamic model of opaque over-the-counter markets. A seller searches for an attractive price by visiting multiple buyers, one at a time. The buyers do not observe contacts, quotes, or trades elsewhere in the market. A repeat contact with a buyer reveals the seller’s reduced outside options and worsens the price offered by the revisited buyer. When the asset value is uncerta...

We investigate a random proposer bargaining game with a dead line. A bounded time interval is divided into bargaining periods of equal length and we study the limit of the subgame perfect equilibrium outcome as the number of bargaining periods goes to infinity while the dead line is kept fixed. This limit is close to the Raiffa solution when the time horizon is very short. If the dead line goes...

We study the ordinal content of assuming supermodularity, including conditions under which a binary relation can be represented by a supermodular function. When applied to revealed-preference relations, our results imply that supermodularity is some times not refutable: A consumer’s choices can be rationalized with a supermodular utility function if they can be rationalized with a monotonic uti...

This paper investigates whether information about generosity or fairness can be useful in reducing dispute costs and enhancing bargaining efficiency. Subjects were first screened using a dictator game, with the allocations chosen used to separate participants into two types. Mutually anonymous pairs of subjects then bargained, with a dispute cost structure imposed. Sorting with identification r...

This paper investigates the causes and welfare consequences of unravelling in two-sided matching markets. It shows that similarity of preferences is an important factor driving unravelling. In particular, it shows that under the ex-post stable mechanism (the mechanism that the literature focuses on), unravelling is more likely to occur when participants have more similar preferences. It also sh...

We develop a model of wage bargaining with private information in a duopoly. We investigate how product differentiation and market competition (Bertrand vs. Cournot competition) affect wages and strikes. If bargaining takes place at the industry-level, then both the wage outcome and the strike activity do not depend on the degree of product differentiation whatever the type of market competitio...

We show that an auctioneer may prefer to restrict entry by exacting an admission fee to having an extra potential bidder in an auction setting with endogenous bidder entry. We also highlight that admission fees and reserve prices are different instruments in a setting with uncertainty over entry costs, and that optimal mechanisms in such settings may be higher-dimensional than in Myerson (1981)...

We consider a two-country model of wage determination with private information in unionized, imperfectly competitive, industries. We investigate the effects of opening up markets to trade as well as of further market integration on the negotiated wage and the maximum delay in reaching an agreement. From an initial situation of two-way intraindustry trade, an increase in product market integrati...

The long-term trends of urbanization suggest: not only have more cities formed, but the leading metropolises have grown larger, with a number of peripheral subcenters developing over time. Conventional models of urban growth are limited, in that commuting cost and congestion eventually result in decreasing returns in a monocentric city as population becomes very large. We construct a general-eq...

In a matching and intra…rm bargaining economy with constant return to scale production and matching technologies, large …rms hire and train workers e¢ciently. The e¢ciency of the competitive economy relies on the ability of large …rm to take into account the consequences of training on the wages bargained inside the …rm. This intra…rm bargaining process solves the hold-up problem that is associ...