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...

If the agent’s preference relation satisfies a strict monotonicity condition in common agency under the asymmetric information, the set of all equilibrium allocations in the menu game where menus of contracts are allowed coincides with the set of all equilibrium allocations in the single...

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.

When penalties for first-time offenders are restricted, it is typically optimal for the lawmaker to overdeter repeat offenders. First-time offenders are then deterred not only by the (restricted) fine for a first offense, but also by the prospect of a large fine for a subsequent offense. Now...

Testing for asymmetric information in insurance markets has become a very important issue in the empirical literature in the last years. We analyze the (private) accident insurance, which has not been analyzed before in the literature, but covers one of the most important risks faced by...

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...

I show that bargaining impasse in Hörner and Vieille (2009) can be interpreted as the limit of bargaining delay: the maximal duration of the game increases unboundedly as the seller’s discount factor approaches the threshold level above which bargaining impasse occurs.

We establish the effort-maximizing rule of allocating heterogeneous prizes when contestants privately observe their effort efficiencies. With ex ante symmetric players and increasing virtual effort efficiency, an all pay auction maximizes the total expected effort.