An optimal auction with identity‐dependent externalities

We analyze the problem of a seller of multiple identical units of a good who faces a set of buyers with unit demands, private information, and identity‐dependent externalities. We derive the seller's optimal mechanism and characterize its main properties. We show that the probability that a buyer obtains a unit is an increasing function of the externalities he generates and enjoys. Also, the seller's allocation of the units of the good need not be ex post efficient. As an illustration, we apply the model to the problem faced by a developer of a shopping mall who wants to allocate and price its retail space among anchor and non‐anchor stores. We show that a commonly used sequential mechanism is not optimal unless externalities are large enough.     

Best foot forward or best for last in a sequential auction?

Should a seller with private information sell the best or worst goods first? Considering the sequential auction of two stochastically equivalent goods, we find that the seller has an incentive to impress buyers by selling the better good first because the seller's sequencing strategy endogenously generates correlation in the values of the goods across periods. When this impression effect is strong enough, selling the better good first is the unique pure‐strategy equilibrium. By credibly revealing to all buyers the seller's ranking of the goods, an equilibrium strategy of sequencing the goods reduces buyer information rents and increases expected revenues in accordance with the linkage principle.     

Information and the hold‐up problem

We examine situations in which a party must make a sunk investment prior to contracting with a second party to purchase an essential complementary input. We study how the resulting hold‐up problem is affected by the seller's information about the investing party's likely returns from its investment. Our principal focus is on the effects of the investment's being observable by the noninvesting party. We establish conditions under which the seller's ability to observe the buyer's investment harms the seller, benefits the buyer, and reduces equilibrium investment and total surplus. We also note conditions under which investment and welfare rise when investment is observable.     

Costly search with adverse selection: solicitation curse versus acceleration blessing

We analyze a dynamic trading model of adverse selection where a seller can increase the frequency of strategic price quotes. A low‐quality seller benefits more from trade and, therefore, searches more intensively than a high‐quality seller. This makes a seller's contact carry negative information but a seller's availability become a stronger indicator of high quality. In the stationary environment, the two effects exactly offset each other, and reducing search costs is weakly beneficial to the seller. In the nonstationary environment, the relative strengths of the two effects vary over time, and reducing search costs can be detrimental to the seller.     

An offer you can't refuse: early contracting with endogenous threat

A seller has private information on the future gains from trade with a buyer, but the buyer has the option to invest to produce the good internally. Both the buyer and the seller can efficiently trade ex post under complete information. Despite the lack of information, the buyer sometimes gains by making an early contract offer to the seller. The early contract divides the different types of sellers according to their information, which renders the threat of producing the good in‐house credible and enables the buyer to extract a larger share of the gains from trade. Several extensions are investigated.     

Unobserved investment,endogenous quality,and trade

A seller can make investments that affect a tradable asset’s future returns. The potential buyer of the asset cannot observe the seller’s investment prior to trade, nor does he receive any signal of it, nor can he verify it in any way after trade. Despite this severe moral‐hazard problem, this article shows the seller will invest with positive probability in equilibrium and that trade will occur with positive probability. The outcome of the game is sensitive to the distribution of bargaining power between the parties, with a holdup problem existing if the buyer has the bargaining power. A consequence of the holdup problem is surplus‐reducing distortions in investment level. Perhaps counterintuitively, in many situations, this distortion involves an increase in the expected amount invested vis‐à‐vis the situation without holdup.     

Do buyer‐size discounts depend on the curvature of the surplus function? Experimental tests of bargaining models

A number of recent theoretical papers have shown that, for buyer‐size discounts to emerge in a bargaining model, the total surplus function over which parties bargain must have certain nonlinearities. We test the theory in an experimental setting in which a seller bargains with a number of buyers of different sizes. Nonlinearities in the surplus function are generated by varying the shape of the seller's cost function. Consistent with the theory, we find that quantity discounts emerge only in the case of increasing marginal cost, corresponding to a concave surplus function. We provide additional structural estimates to help identify the source of remaining discrepancies between experimental behavior and theoretical predictions (whether due to preferences for fairness or other factors such as computation errors).     

论背俗一物二卖中的回复原状救济

一物二卖中第二次买卖违背善良风俗时，如何救济第一买受人对于取得实物的期待利益，是民法学中的经典疑难问题，也是实践中经常发生的代表性案型。就此存在“处分背俗无效”与“处分有效+背俗侵权”两种救济进路，无效进路下可进一步分为“绝对无效”与“相对无效”方案，侵权进路下可分为“标的物返还出卖人”“标的物直接让与第一买受人”等侵权责任承担方式。救济第一买受人的目标是使其法律地位回复到应有状态，影响回复原状方式选择的实质因素包括出卖人原本另行处分之可能性、出卖人原本破产和被执行的风险大小。根据这一分析框架，第二买受人单方背俗时，所有权变动并不无效，只能采侵权进路，第二买受人应将标的物直接让与第一买受人；出卖人与第二买受人双方背俗时，应采相对无效方案，所有权变动相对于第一买受人无效。     

Ex Post Moral Hazard and Bayesian Learning in Insurance

We study a dynamic insurance market with asymmetric information and ex post moral hazard. In our model, the insurance buyer's risk type is unknown to the insurer; moreover, the buyer has the option of not reporting losses. The insurer sets premia according to the buyer's experience rating, computed via Bayesian estimation based on buyer's history of reported claims. Accordingly, the buyer has strategic incentive to withhold information about losses. We construct an insurance market information equilibrium model and show that a variety of reporting strategies are possible. The results are illustrated with explicit computations in a two‐period risk‐neutral case study.     

Optimal disclosure decisions when there are penalties for nondisclosure

We study a seller of an asset who is liable for damages if the seller fails to disclose to buyers an estimate of the asset's value he knew prior to the sale. Our results include as either the “damages multiplier” that determines the size of the damages the seller must pay buyers increases, or as the probability the seller is caught withholding his estimate from buyers increases, the seller discloses his estimate less often, and as the precision of the seller's estimate increases, he sells a larger fraction of the asset.     

Information and bargaining in the hold‐up problem

This article incorporates an information structure with partial information into the canonical hold‐up problem. The optimal information structure balances the tradeoff between ex ante efficiency (the “information rent” effect) and ex post efficiency (the “bargaining disagreement” effect). With one‐shot bargaining, it occurs at an intermediate level of information asymmetry; when there is repeated bargaining, it is attained with perfect asymmetry. Asymmetric information, the parameter that is frequently ignored in the literature, turns out to be an important welfare instrument for the hold‐up problem. Our results therefore provide a basis for institutional design regarding the optimal control of information flow.     

The ownership of ratings

We identify the optimal contract between a rating agency and a firm and the circumstances under which simple ownership contracts implement this optimal solution. We assume that the decision to obtain a rating is endogenous and the price of a rating is a strategic variable. Clients hiding their ratings can be an equilibrium only if they are ex ante uncertain of their quality and if the hiring decision is not observable. For some distribution functions, a competitive rating market is necessary for this result to obtain. In this context, competition between rating intermediaries will lead to less information in equilibrium.     

Selling substitute goods to loss‐averse consumers: limited availability,bargains, and rip‐offs

This article derives the optimal pricing and product‐availability strategies for a retailer selling two substitute goods to loss‐averse consumers and shows that limited‐availability sales manipulate consumers into an ex ante unfavorable purchase. The seller maximizes profits by raising the consumers' reference point through a tempting discount on a good available only in limited supply (the bargain), and cashing in with a high price on the other (the rip‐off), which consumers buy if the bargain is not available to reduce their disappointment. The seller might prefer to offer a deal on the more valuable product, using it as a bait.     

Auctions versus negotiations: the effects of inefficient renegotiation

For the procurement of complex goods, the early exchange of information is important to avoid costly renegotiation. If the buyer can specify the main characteristics of possible design improvements in a complete contingent contract, scoring auctions implement the efficient allocation. If this is not feasible, the buyer must choose between a price‐only auction (discouraging early information exchange) and bilateral negotiations with a preselected seller (reducing competition). Bilateral negotiations are superior if potential design improvements are important, if renegotiation is very costly, and if the buyer's bargaining position is strong. Moreover, negotiations provide stronger incentives for sellers to investigate design improvements.     

Pay-performance sensitivity and firm size: Insights from the mutual fund industry

I examine the ex ante decision to make an agent's pay-performance sensitivity an inverse function of organization size. I focus on mutual funds and their decision to use compensation contracts that reduce the advisor's marginal compensation as the fund grows (a declining-rate contract) over the dominant contract type, where marginal compensation is unrelated to fund size (a single-rate contract). I find evidence consistent with the view that declining-rate contracts are a mechanism to keep marginal compensation in line with the advisor's declining marginal product. Specifically, I find that funds with greater exposure to diseconomies of scale are more likely to use a declining-rate contract and to specify a greater amount of compensation decline in their contracts. Consistent with optimal contracting, I find no evidence of a performance difference between funds with declining-rate contracts and funds with single-rate contracts.     

Information control in the hold‐up problem

We study the use of information control to mitigate hold‐up risks. We identify a distinction between asymmetric information that creates an ex ante investment incentive and asymmetric information that causes ex post inefficiency, which then allows ex post inefficiency to be eliminated without compromising the ex ante investment incentive. We characterize the properties of the optimal information structure and the payoffs and welfare achievable with information control in the presence of hold‐up risks.     

Payoff uncertainty,bargaining power,and the strategic sequencing of bilateral negotiations

This article investigates the sequencing choice of a buyer who negotiates with the sellers of two complementary objects with uncertain payoffs. The possibility of inefficient trade may generate strict sequencing preference. The buyer begins with the weaker seller if the sellers have diverse bargaining powers and with the stronger one if both sellers are strong bargainers. This sequencing is likely to increase the social surplus. Moreover, the buyer may find it optimal to raise her own acquisition cost by committing to a minimum purchase price or outsourcing. The first‐ and second‐mover advantages for the sellers are also identified.     

Bidding into the Red: A Model of Post-Auction Bankruptcy

This paper investigates auctions where bidders have limited liability. First, we analyze bidding behavior under different auction formats, showing that the second‐price auction induces higher prices, higher bankruptcy rates, and lower utilities than the first‐price auction. Second, we show that the cost of bankruptcy critically affects the seller's preference over the choice of auction. If bankruptcy is very costly, the seller prefers the first‐price auction over the second‐price auction. Alternatively, if the bankrupt assets are resold among the losers of the initial auction, the seller prefers the second‐price auction.     

Market Structure,Internal Capital Markets,and the Boundaries of the Firm

We study how the creation of an internal capital market (ICM) can invite strategic responses in product markets that, in turn, shape firm boundaries. ICMs provide ex post resource flexibility, but come with ex ante commitment costs. Alternatively, stand‐alones possess commitment ability but lack flexibility. By creating flexibility, integration can sometimes deter a rival's entry, but commitment problems can also invite predatory capital raising. These forces drive different organizational equilibria depending on the integrator's relation to the product market. Hybrid organizational forms like strategic alliances can sometimes dominate integration by offering some of its benefits with fewer strategic costs.