This paper considers settlement negotiations between a single defendant and $N$ plaintiffs when there are fixed costs of litigation. When making simultaneous take-it-or-leave-it offers to the plaintiffs, the defendant adopts a divide and conquer strategy. Plaintiffs settle their claims for less...

This paper examines how the advice that lawyers provide to their clients affects the disclosure of evidence and the outcome of adjudication, and how the adjudicator should allocate the burden of proof in light of these effects. Despite lawyers' expertise in assessing the evidence, their advice...

The current National Football League overtime rule favors the team starting on offense. Auctioning off or dividing-and-choosing the starting possession can potentially restore ex post fairness. We find auctions to provide a better outcome when teams have asymmetric information.

This paper develops a methodology for characterizing expected revenue from auctions in which bidders' types come from an arbitrary distribution. In particular, types may be multidimensional, and there may be mass points in the distribution. One application extends existing revenue equivalence...

We study a model where a decision maker (DM) must select an adviser to advise her about an unknown state of the world. There is a pool of available advisers who all have the same underlying preferences as the DM; they differ, however, in their prior beliefs about the state, which we interpret as...

We study the initial assignment of ownership of a good. When the good is sold at the market-clearing price, wealthy agents may acquire it instead of poor agents who value it more highly, all else equal. Non-market assignment schemes such as random rationing may allocate the good more efficiently...

A liquidity-constrained entrepreneur needs to raise capital to finance a business activity that may cause injuries to third parties --- the tort victims. Taking the level of borrowing as fixed, the entrepreneur finances the activity with senior (secured) debt in order to shield assets from the...

We study an optimal collusion-proof auction in an environment where subsets of bidders may collude not just on their bids but also on their participation. Despite their ability to collude on participation, informational asymmetry facing the potential colluders can be exploited significantly to...