Resumen de Essays on microeconomics
Juan Ignacio Beccuti Vázquez
This thesis discusses three cases related to microeconomics in dynamic frameworks. It consists on the following chapters: First chapter studies the optimal selling mechanism for a seller who puts up for sale one individual unit per period to a single buyer in a two-period game. The buyer's willingness to pay remains constant over time and is his private information. In the first period, the seller can commit to a mechanism for the current period but not for the second one. The main result is that the seller cannot achieve greater payoffs than those obtained by posting a price in each period. However, price posting is not optimal if the buyer is sufficiently impatient relative to the seller. Finally, it is shown that a mechanism à la Goethe (see Moldovanu and Tieztel 1998) is almost optimal. Second chapter studies the previous model in a multi-period setting when seller and buyer are equally patient. In the two-period model, the degree of that patience did not affect the set of feasible mechanisms. However, with more than two periods, a larger patience of players do affects this set. In particular, some price posting mechanisms that were optimal when players were impatient are not longer feasible when they are sufficiently patient. Additionally, with more than two periods, the seller could engage in gradual learning. The main result is that a seller cannot do better than posting a price in every period. There is also a complete characterization of the optimal mechanism and equilibrium payoffs for every prior. Finally, it shows that when seller and buyer are arbitrarily patient, the seller does not learn about buyer s type except in extreme cases, posting a price equal to the minimum buyer's willingness to pay in every period. This result is a reminiscence of the Coase s conjecture, where a monopolist cannot exert her monopoly power due to the lack of long-term commitment. Third and last chapter proposes a model where firms, which compete for high-skill workers, can distort their production in order to conceal information to the market about the skill of their workers. This occur in a framework where firms differ in their marginal labor productivity and workers in their skill. The main result is that firms actually distort their production and that these distortions are not monotonic in the marginal labor productivity.
