In this paper a market where a buyer (job seeker) is searching in a known order among sellers (e.g., a motorist driving along a road looking for gasoline) is described. Both sellers and buyers are assumed to behave strategically. There are many types of buyers. The sellers know only the distribution of all possible buyers; similarly, buyers have imperfect information about sellers. The analysis is conducted by modeling the market as a game with incomplete information; the equilibrium is characterized. A central feature of the game is that both buyers and sellers rationally update their prior information about each other as the game unfolds sequentially. It is shown that prices need not vary monotonically along the search process.

[A seller and a buyer make offers and counteroffers to one another until they reach an agreement, or else one side decides to terminate the negotiations. Neither side knows the value of the other of reaching an agreement. It is shown,using the concept of sequential equilibrium, that if there are known fixed costs in bargaining, then the bargaining must terminate in a single round. The side with the lower costs of waiting makes an offer which the other side either accepts or rejects by terminating the bargaining.]

This paper presents a wage-bargaining model in which the employer and employee are each uncertain about the other's reservation wage. Under specified circumstances, the model's equilibrium is shown to involve unilateral wage setting and inefficient labor turnover. In addition, aggregate demand shocks affect the equilibrium in a way that produces procyclical quits and countercyclical layoffs. These results are obtained without resorting to assumptions of nominal wage rigidity, long-term contracting, or aggregate price misperceptions.

We provide an ascending auction that yields an efficient outcome when there are many identical units for sale and bidders have interdependent values and downward-sloping demand. Our ascending auction both extends and generalizes Ausubel's (2004) and yields the same outcome as Perry and Reny's (2002) generalization of Vickrey's (1961) sealed-bid auction. There are two key features of our auction. Bidders are permitted both to express different demands against different bidders, as well as to increase their demands. The equilibrium strategies are closely related to the familiar “drop out when price equals value” strategy of the English auction.

This paper concerns the pattern of contributions to a joint project when commitments and enforceable contracts are not available. We analyse a game in which partners alternate in making contributions to the project until the project is completed. Contributions are sunk when they are made. The game has a unique subgame perfect equilibrium path, which is inefficient in the sense that socially desirable projects may not be completed. By contrast, in a “subscription game” in which the cost of the contribution is borne only if and when the contributions committed to the project cover its cost, the outcome is efficient.

This paper analyses a bargaining model with incomplete information in which the time between offers is an endogenous strategic variable. We find equilibria involving a delay to agreement that is due to the use of strategic time delay by bargainers to signal their relative strength. Under some specifications of the parameters, delay is present in the unique sequential equilibrium whose beliefs satisfy one intuitive restriction. This delay does not vanish as the minimal time between offers becomes small.

A step toward a strategic foundation for rational expectations equilibrium is taken by considering a double auction with n buyers and m sellers with interdependent values and a ¢ liated private information. If there are su ¢ ciently many buyers and sellers, and their bids are restricted to a su ¢ ciently …ne discrete set of prices, then, generically, there is an equilibrium in nondecreasing bidding functions that is arbitrarily close to the unique fully revealing rational expectations equilibrium of the limit market with unrestricted bids and a continuum of agents. In particular, the large double auction equilibrium is almost e ¢ cient and almost fully aggregates the agents’information. 1.

It is shown that the linkage principle (Milgrom and Weber (1982)) does not extend to the multi-unit auction setting. An analysis of the equilibium bidding strategies is carried out for the general two-agent/two-unit Vickrey auction in order to provide economic insight into the nature of the failure.

A noncooperative implementation of the core is provided for games with transferable utility. The implementation obtained here is meant to reflect the standard motivation for the core as closely as possible. In the model proposed, time is continuous. This idealized treatment of time is most amenable for capturing an essential feature of the core - there is always time to reject a noncore proposal before it is consumated.