Two potentially asymmetric players compete for a prize of common value, which is initially unknown, by exerting efforts. A designer has two instruments for contest design. First, she decides whether and how to disclose an informative signal of the prize value to players. Second, she sets the...

We study a new market design for K-12 school broadband procurement that switched from school-specific bidding to a system that bundled schools into groups. Using an event study approach, we estimate the program reduced internet prices by 37% per Mbps per month while increasing bandwidth by 500%....

We propose an equilibrium theory of data-driven antitrust oversight in which regulators launch investigations on the basis of suspicious bidding patterns and cartels can adapt to the statistical screens used by regulators. We emphasize the use of asymptotically safe tests, i.e. tests that are...

Auctioneers suspecting bidder collusion often lack the formal evidence needed for legal recourse. A practical alternative is to design auctions that hinder collusion. Since Abreu et al. (1986), economic theory has emphasized imperfect monitoring as a constraint on collusion, but evidence remains...

This paper considers the "DeFi intermediation chain"--the market structure that underlies the creation and distribution of ETH, the native cryptocurrency of Ethereum--to examine how information asymmetry shapes intermediation rents. We argue that using proof-of-stake blockchain technology in...

A sender sends a signal about a state to a receiver who takes an action that determines a payoff. A moderator can block some or all of the sender's signal before it reaches the receiver. When the moderator's policy is transparent to the receiver, the moderator can improve the payoff by blocking...

Liquidity management is key in industries with variable cash flows. We study how businesses in the highway construction industry manage cash flow by strategically bidding more on work with an earlier payout--a practice known as front-end loading. We find that small contractors, infrequent...

We introduce and analyze a new market design for trading financial assets. The design allows traders to directly trade any user-defined linear combination of assets. Orders for such portfolios are expressed as downward-sloping piecewise-linear demand curves with quantities as flows...

We study specialized lending in a credit market competition model with private information. Two banks, equipped with similar data processing systems, possess "general" signals regarding the borrower's quality. However, the specialized bank gains an additional advantage through further...

This is a paper in the ``economists ruin everything'' field. It considers whether Catch-22 situations can persist as an equilibrium phenomenon. Rather than being an arbitrary rule or a set of self-serving beliefs, the focus is on the preferences of Gatekeepers who choose to create such...