Sellers benefit on average from revealing information about their goods to buyers, but the incentive to exaggerate undermines the credibility of seller statements. When multiple goods are being auctioned, we show that ordinal cheap talk, which reveals a complete or partial ordering of the...

We examine a dynamic, durable goods model. A monopolist faces two types of consumers who value the monopolist’s goods differently. The quality of the good improves over time and an improvement is only valuable to consumers if they have previous improvements. In each period, the monopolist can...

We examine patent pools in the context of a consortium standard. Although such pools of complementary technologies are approved by antitrust authorities, the actual implementation has proved to be problematic. We identify two possible obstacles: free riding and bargaining failure. We also...

Most existing theories of the firms define a firm as a collection of physical assets, and hence can not explain the firm from a human-asset perspective, which is of particular importance for understanding human-capital intensive firms. To fill in the gap, this paper proposes an alternative...

We provide an alternative theoretical explanation for a number of empirical regularities relating to the dynamics of industry structrure (product life cycle) and changes in size and age distribution of firms over time. We explain why entry may continue over a considerable period of time, why...

We propose a new location model where consumers are allowed to make multiple purchases (i.e., one unit from each firm). This model fits many markets (e.g. newspapers, credit cards, scholarly journals, subscriptions to TV channels, etc.) better than existing models. A common feature of these...

We present two information-based rationales for why sellers of returnable goods tend to offer refunds in excess of the salvage value of the good. Both explanations require at least the potential presence of consumers who can choose to learn their values for the good prior to purchasing.

I analyze an original dataset on the display inventories of several hundred eyewear retailers to study how firms' product-range choices depend on separation from rivals in geographically-differentiated markets. A two-stage estimation approach is used to model firms' initial location decisions...

In this paper, we study the incumbent's incentive to share its essential facility when there exist network effects. We show that without network effects, the incumbent will charge an access fee high enough to deter the entry. with network effects, however, the incumbent always has an incentive...

This paper considers the parametric inference of a wide range of structural econometric models. The class of models considered includes those with parameter-dependent support and those derived from game-theoretic models. Inference of those models has raised some important econometric issues....