A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a short-listed 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...

We address the scheduling problem of reordering an existing queue into its efficient order through trade. To that end, we consider individually rational and balanced budget direct and indirect mechanisms. We show that this class of mechanisms allows us to form efficient queues provided that...

This paper shows that, contrary to what is generally believed, decreasing concavity of the agent’s utility function with respect to the screening variable is not sufficient to ensure that stochastic mechanisms are suboptimal. The paper demonstrates, however, that they are suboptimal...

We present a new dynamic auction for procurement problems where payments are bounded by a hard budget constraint and money does not enter the procurer's objective function.

The literature on public goods has shown that e?cient outcomes are impossible if participation constraints have to be respected. This paper addresses the question whether they should be imposed. It asks under what conditions e?ciency considerations justify that individuals are forced to pay for...

If bidders are uncertain whether the auctioneer sticks to the announced reserve, some bidders respond by not bidding, speculating that the auctioneer may revoke the reserve. However, the reserve inadvertently signals the auctioneer's type, which drives a unique separating and a multitude of...

This paper considers procurement auctions with costly bidding when the auctioneer is unable to commit himself to restrict the number of bidders. The auctioneer can, however, offer a financial reward to be paid to every short-listed bidders as an indirect commitment device. Rewards for...

A principal uses security bid auctions to award an incentive contract to one among several agents, in the presence of hidden action and hidden information. Securities range from cash to equity and call options. “Steeper†securities are better surplus extractors that narrow the gap...

This paper revisits the standard analysis of licensing a cost reducing innovation by an outside innovator to a Cournot oligopoly. We propose a new mechanism that combines elements of a license auction with royalty licensing by granting the losers of the auction the option to sign a royalty...

We consider a licensing mechanism for process innovations that combines a license auction with royalty contracts to those who lose the auction. Firms’ bids are dual signals of their cost reductions: the winning bid signals the own cost reduction to rival oligopolists, whereas the losing...