Consider a contest for a prize in which each player knows his/her own ability, but may or may not know those of his/her rivals (the complete or incomplete information regimes). Our main result is that, if the value of the prize is high, more effort and output are engendered under incomplete...

We show that any deterministic mechanism, for allocating identical items that are complements to budget-constrained bidders, cannot simultaneously satisfy individual-rationality, strategy-proofness, Pareto-efficiency, and no-positive-transfers. This holds even for two bidders, two items, and...

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 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.

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.

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 consider two-player, perfectly discriminatory, common-value contests (or all-pay auctions), in which one player knows the value of the contested object with certainty, and the other knows only its prior distribution. We show, among other things, that in equilibrium the players win with equal...

This note presents results from modified dictator games in which the payoff-relevant game is either chosen randomly or by the recipients. We do not observe reciprocal behavior when recipients choose the game: Dictators do not condition their donations on the game chosen by recipients.

We show the generic finiteness of probability distributions induced on outcomes by the Nash equilibria in two player zero sum and common interest outcome games.

We study the welfare implications of public information precision in a beauty contest framework allowing for optimal stabilization policies and information obfuscation. When policy makers’ ability to obfuscate information is constrained, increasing public information precision can be welfare...