In a bargaining setting with asymmetrically informed, inequity-averse parties, a fully efficient mechanism (i.e., the double auction) exists if and only if compassion is strong. Less compassionate parties do not trade in the double auction in the limit of strong envy.

We derive several implications of incentive compatibility in general (i.e., not necessarily quasilinear) environments. Building on Kos and Messner (2013), we provide a (partial) characterization of incentive compatible mechanisms.

We show that the commitment to not allocate may be exploited by a seller/social planner to increase the expected social surplus that can be achieved in the sale of an indivisible unit.

This paper describes a nearly optimal auction mechanism that does not require previous knowledge of the distribution of values of potential buyers. The mechanism we propose builds on the new literature on the elicitation of information from experts. We extend the latter to the case where the...

We investigate a two-part tariff licensing contract that enables an incumbent innovator to license the technology for a new product to a potential rival, who may alternatively develop a compatible technology for an imperfectly substitutable product. We identify the optimal two-part tariff...

We consider a two-player all-pay auction with symmetric independent private values that are uniformly distributed. The designer chooses the size of a head start that is given to one of the players. The designer’s objective is to maximize a convex combination of the expected highest effort and...

We provide extensions of the Bulow and Klemperer (1996) result when the seller has value for the object above the minimum value of the buyers. The result may fail. We show that the seller does better with more participation and some exclusion than the optimal exclusion of buyers of low value...

We prove that the maximal bid in asymmetric first-price and all-pay auctions is the same for all bidders. Our proof is elementary, and does not require that bidders are risk neutral, or that the distribution functions of their valuations are independent or smooth.