In an exchange economy under uncertainty with two periods, one physical good, and finitely many states of the world, we show that for every (complete or incomplete) market span there exists a sequence of securities such that if they are introduced into markets one by one, the prices of any security is not affected by the subsequent introduction of newer securities and they together generate the...

We study the alternating-offers bargaining problem of assigning an indivisible and commonly valued object to one of two players who jointly own this object. The players are asymmetrically informed about the object’s value and have veto power over any settlement. There is no depreciation during the bargaining process which involves signalling of private information. We characterise the perfect B...

We present a dynamic model of trading under adverse selection. A seller faces a sequence of randomly arriving buyers. Each buyer receives a noisy signal about the quality of the asset and offers a price. We show that there is generically a unique equilibrium and characterize the resulting trading dynamics. Buyers’ beliefs about the quality of the asset gradually increase or decrease over time, ...

We study the co-evolution of social participation and social capital accumulation, taking the view that the former contributes to the latter, and both contribute to socially enjoyed leisure. We show that a process of substitution of private for social activities (observable in some advanced, affluent economies), might be self-reinforcing and lead to a Pareto-dominated steady state. We find some...

This paper studies a relational contracting model in which the agent is protected by a limited liability constraint. The agent’s effort is his private information and affects the output stochastically. We characterize the optimal relational contract and compare the dynamics of the relationship with that under the optimal long-term contract. Under the optimal relational contract, the relationshi...

The present paper studies repeated oligopoly where the firms compete with price in multiple markets. The markets are subject to independent, stochastic fluctuations in demands. The literature points out that while the demand fluctuations generally hinder collusion, the multimarket contact sometimes facilitates it. We show that on an intermediate range of discount factors where only partial coll...

We study the role of communication within a cartel. Our analysis is carried out in Stigler’s (1964) model of oligopoly with secret price cuts. This is a repeated game with private monitoring since in the model, firms observe neither the prices nor the sales of their rivals. For a fixed discount factor, we identify conditions under which there are equilibria with "cheap talk" communication that ...

This paper revisits a well-known case of optimal fiscal policy in a Ramsey model where consumer utility is defined over consumption and public goods. We show that normalising the size of the population to one eliminates the scope for active policy-making since the decentralised equilibrium coincides with social planning. Then, we modify the model to allow for a population of N > 1 agents, where...

We prove that, in all finite generic extensive-form games of perfect information, a continuous-time best response dynamic always converges to a Nash equilibrium component. We show the robustness of convergence by an approximate best response dynamic: whatever the initial state and an allowed approximate best response dynamic, the state is close to the set of Nash equilibria most of the time. In...

This study analyzes a continuous–time N–agent Brownian moral hazard model with constant absolute risk aversion (CARA) utilities, in which agents’ actions jointly determine the mean and the variance of the outcome process. In order to give a theoretical justification for the use of linear contracts, as in Holmstrom and Milgrom (1987), we consider a variant of its generalization given by Sung (19...