Essays in microeconomic theory

The thesis consists of three separate chapters. In the first chapter, we provide a game-theoretical model of manipulative election campaigns with two political candidates and a continuum of Bayesian voters. Voters are uncertain about candidate positions, which are exogenous and lie on a unidimensional policy space. Candidates take unobservable and costly actions to manipulate a campaign signal that would otherwise be fully informative about a candidate's relative distance from voters' bliss point. We show that if the candidates differ in campaigning efficiency, and voters receive the manipulated signal with an individual, random noise, then the cost-efficient candidate wins the election even if her policy platform is worse than her opponent's platform for the general electorate.;In the second chapter, we consider a model of vertically differentiated duopoly. Quality of the products are unknown to consumers and advertisements are manipulative. We prove that there is no pure-strategy equilibrium unless consumers believe that prices reveal some but imperfect information about the quality difference between the products. We, then, provide a computational analysis of the case, where consumers observe prices with some noise.;In the last chapter, we analyze the long-run behavior of adaptive best-reply social learning processes. Members of a large population randomly match in finite groups to play a symmetric normal-form game. Each individual plays one of the best-reply strategies against the population distribution of strategies. We define limit sets as minimal absorbing sets of the learning process. We show that limit sets equal to the set of population distributions over a minimal CURB sets(as defined by Basu and Weibull, 1991) if and only of they are convex. However, there might be non-convex limit sets outside of minimal CURB sets. We also show that limit sets of best-reply processes with small perturbations always equal to the set of population distributions over minimal CURB sets. Mixed Nash Equilibria, though, are in the closure of limit sets, whenever their support is closed under pure-strategy best replies.