The establishment of an asking, or ceiling, price from which reductions can be bargained is a common selling practice. For a monopolist seller of a single object, this article characterizes the best such ceiling price and shows that its use is optimal among all incentive-compatible mechanisms in...

We address the question of designing dynamic menus to sell experience goods. A dynamic menu consists of a set of price-quantity pairs in each period. The quality of the product is initially unknown, and more information is generated through experimentation. The amount of information in the...

We study an economy in which there is always double coincidence of wants, agents have perfect information about qualities of goods, and there are no transaction costs. The hold-up problem arises because efforts invested in improving quality prior to search may not be compensated in the market....