Research on bargaining suggests that the efficiency of bargaining is related to the size of the surplus to be divided and to uncertainty about the opponent. We conducted a bargaining experiment which manipulated both of these factors. We find that the presence of uncertainty decreases bargaining efficiency, while the effect of contract zone size depends on whether there is uncertainty or certai...

This paper presents a model in which a firm attempts to gain market power by pricing above the competitive market price and simply trying to persuade illinformed consumers not to search for other lower priced firms. Fictitious price comparisons, or false sale signs could be used in this way to deceptively and profitably deter consumer search. A simplified model shows how this mechanism could ex...

We provide easily-verifiable sufficient conditions on the primitives of a Bayesian game to guarantee the existence of a behavioral-strategy Bayes–Nash equilibrium. We allow players’ payoff functions to be discontinuous in actions, and illustrate the usefulness of our results via an example of an all-pay auction with general tie-breaking rules which cannot be handled by extant results. © 2015 El...

This paper studies the relationship between optimal award and scarcity of ideas in innovation contests. We consider contests with different distributions of idea qualities and conduct comparative static analysis of optimal – revenue maximizing – awards with respect to the distributions. We find that a distribution with scarcer ideas leads to higher optimal awards if the marginal value of innova...

In a partially-specified correlated equilibrium (PSCE ) the players are partially informed of the conditional strategies of the other players, and they best respond to the worst-case possible strategy. We construct a decentralized procedure that converges to PSCE when the monitoring is imperfect. This procedure is based on minimizing conditional regret when players obtain noisy signals that dep...

Lotteries are introduced into Cavalcanti and Erosa (2008) [2], a version of Trejos and Wright (1995) [4] with aggregate shocks. Lotteries improve welfare and eliminate the two notable features of the optimum with deterministic trades: over-production and history-dependence. Moreover, the optimum can be supported by buyer take-it-or-leave-it offers. © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. JEL ...

In an asset-pricing model, risk-averse agents need to forecast the conditional variance of a stock’s return. A near-rational restricted perceptions equilibrium exists in which agents believe prices follow a random walk with a conditional variance that is self-fulfilling. When agents estimate risk in real-time, recurrent bubbles and crashes can arise. These effect are stronger when agents allow ...

A dynamic model of financial markets with learning and strategy adoption is demonstrated to produce episodes of market failure. Traders engage in learning to improve their understanding of the relationship between observed prices and future payoffs. Traders also choose between strategies based on fundamental research or on extracting information from market data. The two evolutionary processes ...

A dynamic model with learning and adaptation captures the evolution in trader beliefs and trading strategies. Through a process of learning and observation, traders improve their understanding of the market. Traders also engage in a process of adaptation by switching between trading strategies based on past performance. The asymptotic properties are derived analytically, demonstrating that conv...

Thinking about contingencies, designing covenants and seeing through their implications is costly. Parties to a contract accordingly use heuristics and leave it incomplete. The paper develops a model of bounded rationality and examines its consequences for contractual design. It is argued that cognition is a natural source of adverse selection in contractual relationships, that contracts may be...