This paper presents a model of intertemporal price discrimination. A fixed number of sellers produce a homogeneous good. Consumers with different preferences enter the market in each period and leave when they make a purchase. The sellers typically vary their prices over time, charging a high price in most periods, but occasionally cutting the price to sell to a large group of customers with a low reservation price. In some equilibria, all stores lower their price at the same time and to the same level.
The paper shows that between two competitive but risky economies with no insurance markets, free trade may be Pareto inferior to no trade. The model is simple enough to show clearly the role prices play in transferring and sharing risk when there is an incomplete set of markets, but rich enough to exhibit the resulting inefficiencies dramatically.
This paper examines spatial equilibrium in political competition when established parties choose their platforms competitively while rationally anticipating entry of a vote-maximizing third party. The resulting equilibrium is substantially different from the Hotelling "median" equilibrium. Established parties are spatially separated and third parties will generally lose the election. This provides one theoretical explanation for the stability of two-party systems. Namely that non-cooperative behavior between established parties can effectively prevent third parties from winning.
The Grossman-Hart principal-agent model of moral hazard is extended to the multiple agent case to explore the use of relative performance in optimal incentive contracting. Under the assumption that the principal chooses incentive schemes to implement agent actions as Nash equilibria, necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for the optimality of independent contracts, of rank-order tournaments, and for attainability of the first-best. In this context the relation of the principal's welfare to the correlation between the underlying randomness in outputs of different agents is also investigated. Finally, some problems with the Nash equilibrium implementation assumption are discussed.
In this paper we study the role of promotional expenditures by sellers in a model of product differentiation. Advertising conveys full and accurate information about the characteristics of products. Heterogeneous consumers, who have no source of information other than advertisements, seek to purchase the products that best fit their needs. Despite the roles played by advertising in improving the matching of products and consumers, and in increasing the elasticity of demand faced by each firm, we find that the market-determined Jevels of advertising are excessive, given the extent of diversity in the market. We derive a promotional equilibrium based on a specific information transmission technology, paying explicit attention to the structure of consumer information and its impact on firms' demand curves. This allows us to study the effects of changes in the advertising technology, including an increased ability to target messages to specific groups of consumers, on the equilibrium in the product market. We find that decreased advertising costs may reduce profits by increasing the severity of price competition.
This paper is an analysis of when it will be beneficial for agents engaged in the production of information to form coalitions. The model is cast in a financial market framework, thus leading to an identification of conditions sufficient for the existence of financial intermediaries. Intermediation is shown to improve welfare if informational asymmetries are present, and the information generated to rectify these asymmetries is potentially unreliable. The usual appeal to transactions costs to explain intermediation is not needed.
This paper develops a theory of financial intermediation based on minimizing the cost of monitoring information which is useful for resolving incentive problems between borrowers and lenders. It presents a characterization of the costs of providing incentives for delegated monitoring by a financial intermediary. Diversification within an intermediary serves to reduce these costs, even in a risk neutral economy. The paper presents some more general analysis of the effect of diversification on resolving incentive problems. In the environment assumed in the model, debt contracts with costly bankruptcy are shown to be optimal. The analysis has implications for the portfolio structure and capital structure of intermediaries.