This paper presents a market with asymmetric information where a privately revealing equilibrium obtains in a competitive framework and where incentives to acquire information are preserved. The equilibrium is efficient, and the paradoxes associated with fully revealing rational expectations...

A finite number of sellers (n) compete in schedules to supply an elastic demand. The costs of the sellers have uncertain common and private value components and there is no exogenous noise in the system. A Bayesian supply function equilibrium is characterized; the equilibrium is privately...

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent models of moral hazard: Principals compete through mechanisms in the presence of agents who take unobservable actions. In this context, we provide a rationale for restricting principals to make use of simple mechanisms, which correspond to direct...

We study a capital market in which multiple lenders sequentially attempt at financing a single borrower under moral hazard. We show that restricting lenders to post take-it-or-leave-it offers involves a severe loss of generality: none of the equilibrium outcomes arising in this scenario survives...

Before embarking on a project, a principal must often rely on an agent to learn about its profitability. We model this learning as a two-armed bandit problem and highlight the interaction between learning (experimentation) and production. We derive the optimal contract for both experimentation...

In a public procurement setting, we discuss the desirability of completing contracts with state-contingent clauses providing for monetary compensations to the contractor when revenue shocks occur. Realized shocks are private information of the contractor and this creates agency costs of...

We analyze strategic leaks due to spying out a rival’s bid in a first-price auction. Such leaks induce sequential bidding, complicated by the fact that the spy may be a counterspy who serves the interests of the spied at bidder and reports strategically distorted information. This ambiguity...

We study a symmetric private value auction with signaling, in which the auction outcome is used by an outside observer to infer the bidders’ types. We elicit conditions under which an essentially unique D1 equilibrium bidding function exists in the second-price auction and the English auction....

We consider multiple-principal multiple-agent games of incomplete information. In this context, we identify a class of direct and incentive compatible mechanisms: each principal privately recommends to each agent to reveal her private information to the other principals, and each agent behaves...

We study the optimal entry fee in a symmetric private value first-price auction with signaling, in which the participation decisions and the auction outcome are used by an outside observer to infer the bidders’ types. We show that this auction has a unique fully separating equilibrium bidding...