This paper develops a payoff equivalence theorem for mechanisms with ambiguity averse participants with preferences of the Maxmin Expected Utility (MEU) form (Gilboa and Schmeidler, 1989). We use our payoff equivalence result to explicitly characterize the revenue maximizing private value...

In the basic adverse selection model, a seller makes a contract offer to a privately informed buyer. A fundamental hypothesis of incentive theory is that the seller may want to offer a menu of contracts to separate the buyer types. In the good state of nature, total surplus is not different from...

Prosper, today the second largest social lending marketplace with nearly 1.5 million members and $380 million in funded loans, employed an auction mechanism amongst lenders to finance each borrower's loan until 2010. Given that a basic premise of social lending is cheap loans for borrowers, how...

We study the second best in a single unit sale to two bidders. This is the allocation that maximizes the expected social surplus subject to the biddersʼ incentive compatible constraints when the first best is not implementable. We prove that Maskinʼs (1992) result that any first best...

I study the ex-ante efficient allocation of a set of quality-heterogeneous objects to a number of heterogeneous risk-neutral agents. Agents have independent private values, which represent the maximum cost they are willing to sustain to obtain an object of unitary quality. The designer faces a...

We study the problem of finding the profit-maximizing mechanism for a monopolistic provider of a single, non-excludable public good. Our model covers the most general setting, namely, we allow for correlation in the signal distribution as well as for informational externalities in the...

We consider collective choice from two alternatives. Ex-ante, each agent is uncertain about which alternative she prefers, and may be uncertain about the intensity of her preferences. An environment is given by a probability distribution over utility vectors that is symmetric across agents and...

We examine a model of limited communication in which the seller is selling a single good to two potential buyers. In each of the finite number of periods the seller asks one of the two buyers a binary question. After the final answer, the allocation and the transfers are executed. The model...

We study a mechanism design problem in which players can take part in a mechanism to coordinate their actions in a default game. By refusing to participate in the mechanism, a player can revert to playing the default game non-cooperatively. We show with an example that some allocation rules are...

We study auctions under restricted communication. Agents have valuations distributed over an interval but can only report one of a finite number of messages. We provide necessary conditions for welfare as well as revenue maximizing auctions in the independent private values case when bidders...