The siting of noxious facilities often involves externalities that extend beyond the border of the community selected as a site. Thus, the private information of each community is potentially a vector of costs comprising a cost for each of the possible sites. I characterize the conditions for...

This is an Invited paper for the World Congress of the Econometric Society held in Seattle in August 2000. We discuss the strong connections between auction theory and "standard" economic theory, and argue that auction-theoretic tools and intuitions can provide useful arguments and insights in a...

We study the formation of coalitions that provide public goods to members. Individuals are linked on a tree graph and those with similar preferences are connected on the tree. We present a solution that selects allocations belonging to the coalition structure core and that are also envy-free.

The ability of a long-lived seller to maintain and profit from a good reputation may induce her to provide high quality or effort despite short-run incentives to the contrary. This incentive remains in place with private monitoring, provided that buyers share their information. However, this...

In this paper we address the question of collusion in mechanisms under asymmetric information. We develop a methodology to analyze collusion as an informed principal problem. First, if collusion occurs after the agents accept or reject the principal's offer; the dominant-strategy implementation...

We study Bayesian mechanism design in situations where agents' information may be multi-dimensional, concentrating on mechanisms that lead to efficient allocations. Our main result is that a generalization of the well-known Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism maximizes the planner's "revenue'' among...

This paper compares the performance of direct negotiation, double auction, and a two-sided combinatorial call market for consolidating fragmented land. Experimental results suggest direct negotiation produces higher efficiencies than other mechanisms when 1) all commodities need to be traded to...

This paper provides a model of nonlinear income taxation in a context of international mobility. We consider two identical countries, in which each government chooses non-cooperatively redistributive taxes. It is shown that when skilled workers can move at low cost, the income taxation does not...

I explore the nature of optimal static and dynamic contracts in an environment with moral hazard, where individuals contracting with the same principal receive correlated productivity shocks. The environment resembles the one considered in relative compensation theory ( i.e tournament theory),...

This study examines bidder preferences between alternative auction institutions. We seek to experimentally characterize the degree to which bidders prefer an ascending auction to a sealed bid auction. We find very strong ceteris paribus preferences for the ascending institution with bidders...