This paper provides a limit result for the provision of a public good in a mechanism design framework as the number of agents gets large. What distinguishes the public good investigated in this analysis is its direct provision technology which is commonplace in modern information technologies.

In this paper, we consider a model that suggests that the theory of exchange with asymmetric information seems suitable to provide a possible explanation model of occurrence and duration of civil wars. We show that although civil conflicts are not Pareto optimal ex post they may be Pareto...

In developing countries, empirical evidence suggests that labor unions entail a positive wage gap for unionized workers, in particular in monopolistic and publicly controlled firms. In this paper, we analyze how the presence of a labor union affects the regulation of a monopoly under asymmetric...

In this paper, we examine the consequences of imperfect information on the pattern of transfers from parents to children. Drawing on the theory of mechanism design, we consider a model of family contract with two levels of effort. We prove that equal transfers among children are expected under...

This paper develops an alternative interpretation of the observed inverse relation between market-to-book ratio and long term indebtedness based on the market timing theory of capital structure and provides empirical evidence to substantiate the same. Our findings suggest that in the presence of...

We examine an environment where goods and privately informed buyers arrive stochastically to a market. A seller in this setting faces a sequential allocation problem with a changing population. We characterize the set of incentive compatible allocation rules and provide a generalized revenue...

We model new experience goods in the context of dynamic mechanism design. These are goods for which an agent is unsure of her valuation but can learn it through consumption experience. We consider a dynamic environment with a single buyer and seller in which contracting occurs over T periods,...

Pennings (2000) has shown that the government can speed-up investment by subsidizing the potential investing firm's entry cost while taxing the future proceeds from the investment, so as to render the net expected value of its subsidy program zero. This note argues that while speeding-up the...

The assessment of infrastructure investments is often affected by inaccuracy in traffic forecasting, optimism bias and overvaluation of expected benefits. In general, even when such misrepresentation is not strategically introduced by proponents to push their projects, valuators and decision...