Bitcoin's main innovation lies in allowing a decentralized system that relies on anonymous, profit driven miners who can freely join the system. We formalize these properties in three axioms: anonymity of miners, no incentives for miners to consolidate, and no incentive to assuming multiple...

A key part of decentralized consensus protocols is a procedure for random selection, which is the source of the majority of miners cost and wasteful energy consumption in Bitcoin. We provide a simple economic model for random selection mechanism and show that any PoW protocol with natural...

We analyze the welfare consequences of a monopolist having additional information about consumers' tastes, beyond the prior distribution; the additional information can be used to charge different prices to different segments of the market, i.e., carry out "third degree price discrimination."We...

We consider abstract exchange mechanisms wherein individuals submit "diversified" offers in m commodities, which are then redistributed to them. Our first result is that if the mechanism satisfies certain natural conditions embodying "fairness" and "convenience" then it admits unique prices, in...

This paper explores the consequences of information in sealed bid first price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over valuations, we characterize the set of possible outcomes that can arise in a Bayesian equilibrium for some information structure. In...

We use a laboratory experiment to compare general equilibrium economies in which agents individually allocate their private goods among consumption, investment in production and maintenance of a depreciating public facility. The public facility is financed either by voluntary anonymous...

Consider the following "informational robustness" question: what can we say about the set of outcomes that may arise in equilibrium of a Bayesian game if players may observe some additional information? This set of outcomes will correspond to a solution concept that is weaker than equilibrium,...