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Bargaining Foundations for the Outside Option Principle

Dilip Abreu and Mihai Manea

We study a bargaining game in which a seller can trade with one of two buyers, who have values h and l (h > l). The outside option principle (OOP) predicts that the seller trades with the high-value buyer with probability converging to 1 at a price converging to max(h/2, l) as players become patient. While this prediction is supported by the Markov perfect equilibrium (MPE), a wide range of trading outcomes may emerge in subgame perfect equilibria (SPEs): in the patient limit, the seller can obtain any price in the interval [h/2, h] (and no other); moreover, allocative inefficiency and costly delay are possible.

Search Direction: Position Externalities and Position Auction Bias

Simon P. Anderson and Régis Renault

We formulate a tractable model of pricing under directed search with heterogeneous firm demands. Demand characteristics drive bids in a position auction and enable us to bridge insights from the ordered search literature to those in the position auction literature. Equilibrium pricing implies that the marginal consumer’s surplus decreases down the search order, so consumers optimally follow the firms’ position ordering. A firm suffers from “business stealing” by firms that precede it and “search appeal” from subsequent firms.

Revisiting the Non-Parametric Analysis of Time-Inconsistent Preferences

Federico Echenique and Gerelt Tserenjigmid

We revisit the recent revealed preference analysis of sophisticated quasi-hyperbolic consumers by Blow, Browning, and Crawford (2021) (BBC). We show that BBC’s revealed preference test is too lax. There are non-rationalizable data that would pass their test. A basic problem with their test is that it requires finding a certain endogenous elasticity, without regard to the rationalizing utility. Their approach motivates a more stringent test, also based on first-order conditions, that would connect the endogenous elasticity and utility: We show that this test is also too lax.

Overconfidence and Prejudice

Paul Heidhues, Botond Kőszegi, and Philipp Strack

We develop a model of multi-dimensional misspecified learning in which an overconfident agent learns about groups in society from observations of his and others’ successes. We show that the average person sees his group relative to other groups too positively, and this in-group bias exhibits systematic comparative-statics patterns. First, a person is most likely to have negative opinions about other groups he competes with. Second, while information about another group’s achievements does not lower a person’s prejudice, information about economic or social forces affecting the group can, and personal contact with group members has a beneficial effect that is larger than in classical settings.

Community Enforcement with Endogenous Records

Harry Pei

I study repeated games with anonymous random matching where players can add or remove signals from their records. The ability to manipulate records introduces monotonicity constraints on players’ continuation values, under which sufficiently long-lived players will almost never cooperate. When players’ expected lifespans are intermediate, their ability to sustain cooperation depends on (i) whether their actions are complements or substitutes and (ii) whether manipulation takes the form of adding or removing signals.

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We are pleased to introduce Niels Gormsen (@NielsGormsen), Copenhagen Business School & University of Chicago, as a new member of the Editorial Board of REStud. His outstanding expertise will help us continue to publish pioneering economic research.
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Welcome aboard! Jose Vasquez (@jpvasq), London School of Economics, has joined the Editorial Board of The Review of Economic Studies. We are grateful to have his expertise supporting our mission.
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We are thrilled to announce that Ro’ee Levy (@RoeeLevyZ), Tel Aviv University School of Economics, is joining the Editorial Board of The Review of Economic Studies. We look forward to his valuable contributions to the journal’s future.
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Exciting news: Dávid Nagy, CREI, has joined the Editorial Board of The Review of Economic Studies. His deep knowledge will help guide the journal’s editorial process.
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