We consider the problem of a single seller repeatedly selling a single item to a single buyer (specifically, the buyer has a value drawn fresh from known distribution D in every round). Prior work assumes that the buyer is fully rational and will perfectly reason about how their bids today affect the seller’s decisions tomorrow. In this work we initiate a different direction: the buyer simply r...

This paper finds an optimal mechanism for selling a good to a buyer who may be budget-constrained. We consider a seller with one unit of a good facing a buyer with a quasilinear utility function. If the buyer does not face a binding budget constraint, textbook monopoly pricing is optimal. By contrast, the possibility of a binding budget constraint can make it optimal for the seller to use nonli...

Trust is vital for market development, but how can trust be enhanced in an online marketplace? A common view is that more trusting of buyers may help to build seller trustworthiness. This paper highlights a possibility that encouraging buyer trusting may lower seller trustworthiness in equilibrium. In particular, we set up a rational expectation model in which a marketplace uses buyer protectio...

We model new experience goods in the context of dynamic mechanism design. These are goods for which an agent is unsure of her valuation but can learn it through consumption experience. We consider a dynamic environment with a single buyer and seller in which contracting occurs over T periods, where each time the agent consumes the object, she receives a signal which allows her to revise her val...

This article characterizes the conditions under which holdout (i.e. bargaining inefficiency) may, or may not be significant in a two-sided, one-buyer-many-seller model with complementarity. Our central result is that the severity of holdout (i.e. inefficiency) is critically dependent on three factors, (a) the transparency of the bargaining protocol, (b) the outside option of the buyer, and (c) ...

This paper analyzes a bilateral trade model where the buyer can choose any cumulative distribution function (CDF) supported on [0, 1], which then determines her valuation. The seller, after observing the buyer’s choice of the CDF but not its realization, gives a takeit-or-leave-it offer to the buyer. We characterize the unique equilibrium outcome of this game and show that in this outcome, the ...