We characterize optimal selling protocols/equilibria of a game in which an Agent first puts hidden effort to acquire information and then transacts with a Firm that uses this information to take a decision. We determine the equilibrium payoffs that maximize incentives to acquire information. Our...

An Agent who owns information that is potentially valuable to a Firm bargains for its sale, without commitment and certification possibilities, short of disclosing it. We propose a model of gradual persuasion and show how gradualism helps mitigate the hold-up problem (that the Firm would not pay...

We study the classic sequential screening problem in the presence of ex post participation constraints. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions that determine when the optimal selling mechanism is either static or sequential. In the static contract, the buyers are not screened with...

We consider truthful implementation of the socially efficient allocation in a dynamic private value environment in which agents receive private information over time. We propose a suitable generalization of the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism, based on the marginal contribution of each agent. In...

We study the classic sequential screening problem under ex-post participation constraints. Thus the seller is required to satisfy buyers' ex-post participation constraints. A leading example is the online display advertising market, in which publishers frequently cannot use up-front fees and...

We study the classic sequential screening problem under ex-post participation constraints. Thus the seller is required to satisfy buyers' ex-post participation constraints. A leading example is the online display advertising market, in which publishers frequently cannot use up-front fees and...

We study the classic sequential screening problem in the presence of ex-post participation constraints. We establish necessary and sufficient conditions that determine exhaustively when the optimal selling mechanism is either static or sequential. In the static contract, the buyers are not...

A single unit of a good is to be sold by auction to one of two buyers. The good has either a high value or a low value, with known prior probabilities. The designer of the auction knows the prior over values but is uncertain about the correct model of the buyers' beliefs. The designer evaluates...

We study auction design when bidders have a pure common value equal to the maximum of their independent signals. In the revenue maximizing mechanism, each bidder makes a payment that is independent of his signal and the allocation discriminates in favor of bidders with lower signals. We provide...

This paper presents an experiment on a coordination game with extrinsic random signals, in which we systematically vary the stochastic process generating these signals and measure how signals affect behavior. We find that sunspot equilibria emerge naturally if there are salient public signals....