I study the canonical private value auction model for a single good without the quasilinearity restriction. I assume only that bidders are risk averse and the indi- visible good for sale is a normal good. I show that removing quasilinearity leads to qualitatively different solutions to the...

In their seminal paper on the principal-agent model with moral hazard, Grossman and Hart (1983) show that if the agent's utility function is $U(I,a)=-e^{-k(I-a)}$, then the loss to the principal from being unable to observe the agent's action is increasing in the agent's degree of absolute risk...

This document is the result of the Rural Territorial Dynamics Program, implemented by Rimisp in several Latin American countries in collaboration with numerous partners. The program has been supported by the International Development Research Center (IDRC, Canada). We authorize the...

This paper studies mechanism design when agents are maxmin expected utility maximizers. A first result gives a general necessary condition for a social choice rule to be implementable. The condition combines an inequality version of the standard envelope characterization of payoffs in...

We study optimal price discrimination when a monopolist faces a continuum of consumers with reference-dependent preferences. A consumer's valuation for product quality consists of an intrinsic valuation affected by a private state signal (type), and a gain-loss valuation that depends on...

Following Kreps (1979), I consider a decision maker who is uncertain about her future taste. This uncertainty leaves the decision maker with a preference for flexibility: When choosing among menus containing alternatives for future choice, she weakly prefers menus with additional alternatives....

A principal seeks to efficiently allocate a productive public resource to a number of possible users. Vickrey–Clarke–Groves (VCG) mechanisms provide a detail-free way to do so provided users have deep pockets. In practice however, users may have limited resources. We study a dynamic...

We study a two periods model of incomplete markets with nominal assets unsecured by collateral, where agents can go bankrupt but there are no bankruptcy penalties entering directly in the utility function. We address two cases: first, a proportional reimbursement rule under bounded short sales...