We study optimal selling strategies of a seller who is poorly informed about the buyer’s value for the object. When the maxmin seller only knows that the mean of the distribution of the buyer's valuations belongs to some interval then nature can keep him to payoff zero no matter how much...

Under appropriate assumptions (private values and uniform punishments), the Nash equilibria of a Bayesian repeated game without discounting are payoff-equivalent to tractable, completely revealing, equilibria and can be achieved as interim cooperative solutions of the initial Bayesian game. This...

This paper explores the sale of an object to an ambiguity averse buyer. We show that the seller can increase his profit by using an ambiguous mechanism. That is, the seller can benefit from hiding certain features of the mechanism that he has committed to from the agent. We then characterize the...

The second-generation GSM spectrum auction in Germany is probably the most clear cut example of a low price outcome in a simultaneous ascending-bid auction.The present paper gives an account of the events, describes the auction rules and market conditions, and provides a theoretical explanation...

Belief elicitation is central to inference on economic decision making. The recently introduced Binarized Scoring Rule (BSR) is heralded for its robustness to individuals holding risk averse preferences and for its superior performance when eliciting beliefs. Consequently, the BSR has become the...

Riordan and Sappington (JET, 1988) show that in an agency relationship in which the agent's type is correlated with a public ex post signal, the principal may attain first best (full surplus extraction and efficient output levels) if the agent is faced with a lottery such that each type is...

This paper identifies conditions under which, starting from any tax distorting equilibrium, destination- and origin-based indirect tax-harmonizing reforms are potentially Pareto improving in the presence of global public goods. The first condition (unrequited transfers between governments)...