This paper analyzes an ongoing bargaining situation in which preferences evolve over time and the previous agreement becomes the next status quo, determining the payoffs until a new agreement is reached. We show that the endogeneity of the status quo exacerbates the players' conflict of interest...

Can direct democracy provisions improve welfare over pure representative democracy? This paper studies how such provisions affect politicians' incentives and selection. While direct democracy allows citizens to correct politicians' mistakes, it also reduces the incentives of elected...

Diermeier and Fong (2008a) recently proposed a legislative bargaining model with reconsideration in the context of a distributive policy environment. In this paper we prove general existence and necessary conditions for pure-strategy stationary equilibria for any finite policy space and...

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.

This paper considers dynamic games in which multiple principals contract sequentially and non-cooperatively with the same agent. We first show that when contracting is private, i.e. when downstream principals observe neither the mechanisms offered upstream nor the decisions taken in these...

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...

We illustrate, by means of two examples, why assuming the principals offer simple menus (i.e. collections of payoff-relevant alternatives) as opposed to more general mechanisms may preclude a complete characterization of the set of equilibrium outcomes in certain sequential contracting...

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...