This paper considers the canonical sequential screening model and shows that when the agent has an ex post outside option, the principal does not benefit from eliciting the agent's information sequentially. Unlike in the standard model without ex post outside options, the optimal contract is...

We study all-pay contests with an exogenous minimal effort constraint where a player can participate in a contest only if his effort (output) is equal to or higher than the minimal effort constraint. Contestants are privately informed about a parameter (ability) that affects their cost of...

It is well known that ex post efficient mechanisms for the provision of indivisible public goods are not interim individually rational. However, the corresponding literature assumes that agents who veto a mechanism can enforce a situation in which the public good is never provided. This paper...

We explore the feasibility of a funded pension system with intergenerational risk sharing when participation in the system is voluntary. Typically, the willingness of the young to participate depends on their belief about the future young's willingness to do so. We characterise equilibria with...

We explore voluntary participation in pension arrangements. Individuals only participate when participation is more attractive than autarky. The benefit of participation is that risks can be shared with future generations. We apply our analysis to a pay-as-you-go system, a funded system without...

When an individual performs several tasks simultaneously, resources must be allocated to different brain systems to produce energy for neurons to fire. Following the evidence from neuroscience, we model the brain as an organization in which a coordinator allocates limited resources to the brain...

This paper provides an elementary, non-technical, survey of auction theory, by introducing and describing some of the critical papers in the subject. The most important of these are reproduced in a companion book, The Economic Theory of Auctions, Paul Klemperer (ed.), Edward Elgar (pub.),...

We study how securities and trading mechanisms can be designed to mitigate the adverse impact of market imperfections on liquidity. Following De Marzo and Duffie (1999), we consider asset owners who seek to obtain liquidity by selling their claims on future cash-flows, on which they have private...

We study the allocation of several heterogenous, commonly ranked objects to impatient agents with privately known characteristics who arrive sequentially according to a Poisson or renewal process. We analyze and compare the policies that maximize either welfare or revenue. We focus on two cases:...

We characterize the divergence between in informational and economic efficiency in a rational expectations competitive market with asymmetric information about the costs of production. We find that prices may contain too much or too little information with respect o incentive efficient...