We extend the 'no-haggling' result of Riley and Zeckhauser (1983) to the class of linear multiproduct monopoly problems when the buyer's valuations are smoothly distributed. In particular we show that there is no loss for the seller in optimizing over mechanisms such that all allocations belong...

We solve for the optimal mechanism for selling two goods when the buyer's demand characteristics are unobservable. In the case of substitutable goods, the seller has an incentive to offer lotteries over goods in order to charge the buyers with large differences in the valuations a higher price...

Online platforms provide search tools that help consumers to get betterfitting product offers. But this technology makes consumer search behavior also easily traceable for the platform and allows for real-time price discrimination. Consumers face a trade-off: Search intensely and receive better...

We study how an optimal income tax and an optimal public-goods provision rule respond to preference and productivity shocks. A conventional Mirrleesian treatment is shown to provoke manipulations of the policy mechanism by individuals with similar interests. We therefore extend the Mirrleesian...

We study the provision of an excludable public good to discuss whether the imposition of participation constraints is desirable. It is shown that this question may equivalently be cast as follows: should a firm that produces a public good receive tax revenues, or face a self-financing...

We propose a new approach to the normative analysis of public-good provision in a large economy. Our analysis is based on a mechanism design approach that involves a requirement of coalition-proofness, as well as a requirement of robustness, so that the mechanism must not depend on specific...

By using general information structures and precision criteria based on the dispersion of conditional expectations, we study how oligopolists' information acquisition decisions may change the effects of information sharing on the consumer surplus. Sharing information about individual cost...

We consider a principal-agent model with moral hazard where the agent's knowledge about the performance measure is ambiguous and he is averse towards ambiguity. We show that the principal may optimally provide no incentives or contract only on a subset of all informative performance measures....

We modify the principal-agent model with moral hazard by assuming that the agent is expectation-based loss averse according to Köszegi and Rabin (2006, 2007). The optimal contract is a binary payment scheme even for a rich performance measure, where standard preferences predict a fully...

We develop a dynamic model of political competition. Each party has a policymotivated ideological wing and an office-motivated opportunistic wing. A blockade arises if inner-party conflict stops policy implementation. We use this model to study whether early elections should be used to overcome...