Focussing on their analysis of the optimal public goods provision problems, this paper follows the parallel development of equilibrium models and mechanism design after the accommodation of Samuelson's definition of collective goods to the general equilibrium framework. Both paradigms lead to...

Focussing on their analysis of the optimal public goods provision problem, this paper follows the parallel development of equilibrium models and mechanism design after the accommodation of Samuelson's definition of collective goods to the general equilibrium framework. Both paradigms lead to the...

When bidders are not substitutes, we show that there is no standard ascend-ing auction that implements a bidder-optimal competitive equilibrium under truthful bidding. Such an impossibility holds also in environments where the Vickrey payoff vector is a competitive equilibrium payoff and is thus...

The folk theorem characterizes the (subgame perfect) Nash equilibrium payoffs of an undiscounted or discounted infinitely repeated game - with fully informed, patient players - as the feasible individually rational payoffs of the one-shot game. To which extent does the result still hold when...

This paper examines a financier's optimal monitoring intensity in a multi-period financing relationship.We identify conditions under which the financier should sometimes misidentify the quality of an entrepreneur. Such an imperfect evaluation technology affects action choices by bad...

A government agency delegates to a provider (hospital, medical gatekeeper, school, social worker) the decision to supply a service or treatment to individual recipients. The agency does not perfectly know the distribution of individual treatment costs in the population. The single-crossing...

We consider a second price auction between bidders with independently and identically distributed valuations, where a losing bidder suffers a negative direct externality. Considering ex-ante commitments to form bidding rings we study the question of core stability of the grand coalition, namely:...

This paper investigates optimal communication mechanisms with a two-dimensional policy space and no monetary transfers. Contrary to the one-dimensional setting, when a single principal controls two activities undertaken by his agent (cooperative design), the optimal communication mechanism never...

We study the problem faced by firms that invest in a foreign country characterized by weak governance. Our focus is on extortion relying on the threat of expropriation and bureaucratic harassment. The bureaucrat's power is characterized by looking at a general extortion mechanism adapted from...

This paper considers the implementation of an economic outcome under complete information when the strategic and informational details of the participation game are partially-specified. This means that full participation is required to be a subgame-perfect equilibrium for a large variety of...