It is well-known that the ability of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to implement efficient outcomes for private value choice problems does not extend to interdependent value problems. When an agent's type affects other agents' utilities, it may not be incentive compatible for him to...

A principal wishes to distribute an indivisible good to a population of budget-constrained agents. Both valuation and budget are an agent's private information. The principal can inspect an agent's budget through a costly verification process and punish an agent who makes a false statement. I...

It is well-known that the ability of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves (VCG) mechanism to implement efficient outcomes for private value choice problems does not extend to interdependent value problems. When an agent's type affects other agents' utilities, it may not be incentive compatible for him to...

Received auction theory prescribes that a reserve price which maximizes expected profit should be no less than the seller's own value for the auctioned object. In contrast, a common empirical observation is that many auctions have reserve prices set below sellers' values, even at zero. This...

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...

A principal allocates an object among a finite number of agents, each of whom values the object. Each agent has access to private information about the principal's payoff if he receives the object. There are no monetary transfers. The object is allocated based on the agents' reports. The...

We establish conditions under which an English auction for an indivisible risky asset has an efficient ex post equilibrium when the bidders are heterogeneous in both their exposures to, and their attitudes toward, the ensuing risk the asset will generate for the winning bidder. Each bidder's...

A single unit of a good is to be sold by auction to one of many potential buyers. There are two equally likely states of the world. Potential buyers receive noisy signals of the state of the world. The accuracies of buyers signals may differ. A buyers valuation is the sum of a common value...

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....