We study the question whether procurement procedures that simultaneously determine specification and price of a good can result in an inefficient specification choice. Two suppliers can produce a good in either of two specifications, and both are equally good for the buyer. Costs are...

We study procurement procedures that simultaneously determine specification and price of a good. Suppliers can offer and produce the good in either of two possible specifications, both of which are equally good for the buyer. Production costs are interdependent and unknown at the time of...

We study procurement procedures that simultaneously determine specification and price of a good. Suppliers can offer and produce the good in either of two possible specifications, both of which are equally good for the buyer. Production costs are interdependent and unknown at the time of...

We study procurement procedures that simultaneously determine specification and price of the required good. Two suppliers can each produce the good in any one of two possible specifications, both of which are equally good for the buyer. Production costs are interdependent and unknown at the time...

We introduce 'formal methods' of mechanized reasoning from computer science to address two problems in auction design and practice: is a given auction design soundly specified, possessing its intended properties; and, is the design faithfully implemented when actually run? Failure on either...

Formal methods use computers to verify proofs or even discover new theorems. Interest in applying formal methods to problems in economics has increased in the past decade, but - to date - none of this work has been published in economics journals. This paper applies formal methods to a familiar...

The endogeneity of equilibrium strategies makes modelling uncertainty about the behaviour of other economic players difficult. Recent developments in decision and game theory offer an opportunity to include strategic uncertainty as an explanatory variable in economic analysis. This paper...

In the Crawford-Sobel (uniform, quadratic utility) cheap-talk model we allow for mediation in which the informed agent reports one possible element of a partition to a mediator (a communication device) and then the mediator suggests an action to the uninformed decision-maker according to the...

If an inspector is work averse and his effort spent on investigating reports is not observable this creates a moral hazard problem whenever there is an imperfect monitoring technology. This problem arises because the organization can not distinguish between an inspection that doesn't find...

We study dominant strategy implementation in the compromise setting of Borgers and Postl (2006), in which two agents have to choose one of three mutually exclusive alternatives. The agents' ordinal rankings of these three alternatives are commonly known among them, and they are diametrically...