A principal provides budgets to agents (e.g., divisions of a firm or the principal's children) whose expenditures provide her benefits, either materially or because of altruism. Only agents know their potential to generate benefits. We prove that if the more "productive" agents are also more...

How should an organization's center allocate resources to units under its control which are better informed? Even with conscientious productivity reviews, important information will remain asymmetrically held. If units value their own expenditures more than those of their peers, they will seek...

We consider the mechanism design problem when agents' types are multidimensional and continuous, and their valuations are interdependent. If there are at least three agents whose types satisfy a weak correlation condition, then for any decision rule there exist balanced transfers that render...

Consumerism arises when patients acquire and use medical information from sources apart from their physicians, such as the Internet and direct-to-patient advertising. Consumerism has been hailed as a means of improving quality. This need not be the result. Consumerist patients place additional...

Consumerism arises when patients acquire and use medical information from sources apart from their physicians, such as the Internet and direct-to-patient advertising. Consumerism has been hailed as a means of improving quality. This need not be the result. Consumerist patients place additional...

A seller faces a buyer with unknown reservation value. We show that buyer risk aversion can make it in the seller's interest to haggle. That is, the seller should make an initial offer and then, if it is rejected, make a second offer with some probability strictly less than one. This is true...

A price-setting seller faces a buyer with unknown reservation value. We show that if the buyer is sufficiently risk averse, the seller can benefit from employing a Possibly-Final Offer (PFO) strategy. In a PFO, if the buyer rejects the seller's initial offer the seller sometimes terminates the...

Recommender and reputation systems seek to inform potential customers by securing current consumers' feedback about products and sellers. This paper proposes a payment-based system to induce honest reporting of feedback. The system applies proper scoring rules to each buyer's report, looking to...

We consider mechanism design in social choice problems in which agents' types are mutually payoff-relevant, multidimensional, and take on a continuum of possible values. If the center receives a signal that is stochastically related to the agents' types and direct returns are bounded, for any...