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...

We consider a Battle of the Sexes game with two types, High and Low, for each player and allow cheap talk regarding players' types before the game. We prove that the unique fully revealing symmetric cheap talk equilibrium exists for a low range of prior probability of the High-Type. This...

In the Crawford-Sobel (uniform, quadratic utility) cheap-talk model, we consider a simple mediation scheme (a communication device) in which the informed agent reports one of the N possible elements of a partition to the mediator and then the mediator suggests one of the N actions to the...

We consider a Battle of the Sexes game with incomplete information and allow cheap talk regarding players' private information before the game is played. We prove that the unique fully revealing symmetric cheap talk equilibrium has a desirable coordination property. Such coordination can also be...

We analyze the Hotelling-Downs model of a winner-take-all elections with sequential entry where n 2 'office-seeking' candidates with privately known qualities arrive in an order to announce platform commitments and voters receive partially informative exogenous signals about quality of each...