The authors consider a single consumer buying a stream of goods from different sellers over time. The true value of each seller's product is initially unknown. Additional information is obtained by experimentation. For exogenous prices, this is a multiarmed bandit problem. The innovation here is...

We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire (covert) information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists that provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient...

The mechanism design literature assumes too much common knowledge of the environment among the players and planner. We relax this assumption by studying mechanism design on richer type spaces. Copyright The Econometric Society 2005.