This paper takes a mechanism design approach to federalism and assumes that local preferences are the private information of local jurisdictions. Contractual federalism is defined as a strategy-proof contract among the members of the federation supervised by a benevolent but not omniscient...

These notes examine the problem of how to extend envelope theorems to infinite-horizon dynamic mechanism design settings, with an application to the design of bandit auctions.

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer's objective function,...

We study second-degree price discrimination in markets where the product traded by the monopolist is access to other agents. We derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the welfare and the profit-maximizing mechanisms to employ a single network or a menu of non-exclusive networks. We...

The conflict between Pareto optimality and incentive compatibility, that is, the fact that some Pareto optimal (efficient) allocations are not incentive compatible is a fundamental fact in information economics, mechanism design and general equilibrium with asymmetric information. This important...

We develop a theory of price discrimination in many-to-many matching markets in which agents' preferences are vertically and horizontally differentiated. The optimal plans induce negative assortative matching at the margin: agents with a low value for interacting with other agents are included...

This paper studies the exchange of information between two principals who contract sequentially with the same agent, as in the case of a buyer who purchases from multiple sellers. We show that when (a) the upstream principal is not personally interested in the downstream level of trade, (b) the...

We study a principal who allocates a good to agents with private, independently distributed values through an optimal mechanism. The principal can strategically shape these value distributions by modifying the good's features, which affect agents' valuations. Our analysis reveals that optimal...

We consider a budget-constrained mechanism designer who selects an optimal set of projects to maximize her utility. Projects may differ in their value for the designer, and their cost is private information. In this allocation problem, the quantity of procured projects is endogenously determined...

This note establishes a revelation principle in terms of payoff for deterministic mechanisms under ex-post constraints: the maximal payoff implementable by a feasible deterministic mechanism can also be implemented by a feasible deterministic direct mechanism.