The Scope of Anonymous Voluntary Bargaining Under Asymmetric Information

We present a model of anonymous collective bargaining where individuals'preferences and information may be significantly interdependent. We showthat the bargaining outcome becomes independent of individuals'preferences and information as the bargaining group increases in size. As acorollary, we show that anonymous voluntary bargaining completely fails inlarge groups. Either the difference between the bargaining outcome and thestatus quo vanishes as the size of the group becomes larger, or, thebargaining becomes coercive and results in a violation of at least someindividuals' rights. The result provides a rationale for the inherentdifficulty of reform in the presence of asymmetric information.
"There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful ofsuccess, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order ofthings."
Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (1532)     

The relevance of private information in mechanism design

Recent results in mechanism design show that as long as agents have correlated private information and are sufficiently risk neutral, it is possible to design mechanisms that leave agents with arbitrarily small information rents. We show that these full-rent-extraction results hinge on the implicit assumption that the agents’ beliefs uniquely determine their preferences. We present an example of the voluntary provision of a public good in which this assumption is relaxed, and consequently, even in highly correlated environments, if agents’ beliefs do not uniquely determine their preferences, then the extraction of the agents’ entire information rents is impossible.     

The benefit of collective reputation

We study a model of reputation with two long‐lived firms who operate under a collective brand or as two individual brands. Firms' investments in quality are unobserved and can only be sustained through reputational concerns. In a collective brand, consumers cannot distinguish between the two firms. In the long run, this generates incentives to free‐ride on the other firm's investment, but in the short run, it mitigates the temptation to milk a good reputation. The signal structure and consumers' prior beliefs determine which effect dominates. We interpret our findings in light of the type of industry in which the firms operate.     

The effectiveness of English auctions

We study the performance of the English auction under different assumptions about the seller's degree of “Bayesian sophistication.” We define the effectiveness of an auction as the ratio between the expected revenue it generates for the seller and the expected valuation of the object to the bidder with the highest valuation (total surplus). We identify tight lower bounds on the effectiveness of the English auction for general private-values environments, and for private-values environments where bidders' valuations are non-negatively correlated. For example, when the seller faces 12 bidders who the seller believes have non-negatively correlated valuations whose expectations are at least as high as 60% of the maximal possible valuation, an English auction with no reserve price generates an expected price that is more than 80% of the value of the object to the bidder with the highest valuation.     

The asymptotic strategyproofness of scoring and Condorcet consistent rules

We calculate the proportion of preference profiles where “small” coalitions of agents may successfully manipulate any given scoring rule and show that it decreases to zero at a rate proportional to with the number of agents. If agents have to incur a small cost in order to decide how to manipulate the voting rule, our results imply that scoring rules are robust to such manipulation in large groups of agents. We present examples of asymptotically strategyproof and non strategyproof Condorcet consistent rules. We thank Eric Maskin and Shmuel Nitzan for useful discussions. We also thank seminar participants at Harvard, Haifa, and Technion universities for their comments. Neeman is grateful for the generous financial support of the NSF under grant SBR-9806832.     

Termination and Coordination in Partnerships

It is common practice for firms to pool their expertise by forming partnerships such as joint ventures and strategic alliances. A central organization problem in such partnerships is that managers may behave noncooperatively in order to advance the interests of their parent firms. We ask whether contracts can be designed so that managers will maximize total profits. We characterize first best contracts for a variety of environments and show that efficiency imposes some restrictions on the ownership shares. In addition, we evaluate the performance of two termination contracts that are widely used in practice: the shotgun rule and price competition. We find that although these contracts do not achieve full efficiency, they both perform well. We provide insight into when each rule is more efficient.     

Options as a Marketing Tool: Pricing a Promotional Scheme for a Product with a Secondary Market

Adding options to durable products allows new opportunities for manufacturers and retailers in markets with a secondary market to create better segmentation schemes, provide creative means to differentiate their products and services, and increase the value they offer consumers. This raises the need for sellers to properly price such options. This work presents a few examples of incentive programs for the car industry, develops models and calculates their cost to the seller, demonstrating the applicability of the proposed methodology. Our numerical results indicate that such options are surprisingly inexpensive for car manufacturers and dealers. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.