Following Kreps (1979), I consider a decision maker who is uncertain about her future taste. This uncertainty leaves the decision maker with a preference for flexibility: When choosing among menus containing alternatives for future choice, she weakly prefers menus with additional alternatives....

Following Kreps (1979), I consider a decision maker who is uncertain about her future taste. This uncertainty leaves the decision maker with a preference for flexibility: When choosing among menus containing alternatives for future choice, she weakly prefers menus with additional alternatives....

This paper develops a positive model of informal contracting in which rewards and punishments are not determined by an ex ante optimal plan but instead express the ex post moral sentiments of the arbitrating party. We consider a subjective performance evaluation problem in which a principal can...

Prominent research argues that consumers often use personal budgets to manage self-control problems. This paper analyzes the link between budgeting and self-control problems in consumption-saving decisions. It shows that the use of good-specific budgets depends on the combination of a demand for...

A decision maker, named Alice, wants to know if an expert has significant information about payoff-relevant probabilities of future events. The expert, named Bob, either knows this probability almost perfectly or knows nothing about it. Hence, both Alice and the uninformed expert face...

We study monopolistic design of a menu of non-linear tariffs when consumers have biased prior beliefs regarding their future preferences. In our model, consumers are "optimistic'' if their prior belief assigns too much weight to states of nature characterized by large gains from trade. A...

The provision of public goods under asymmetric information has most often been viewed as a mechanism design problem under the aegis of an uninformed mediator. This paper focuses on institutional contexts without such mediator. Contributors privately informed on their willingness to pay...

We study the optimal auditing of a taxpayer's income in a dynamic principal-agent model of hidden income. Taxpayers in our model initially have low income and stochastically transit to high income that is an absorbing state. A low-income taxpayer who transits to high income can under-report his...

We show that a solution to the problem of mechanism selection by an informed principal exists in a large class of environments with “generalized private values”: the agents’ payoff functions are independent of the principal’s type. The solution is an extension of Maskin and Tirole’s...

A seller of a divisible good faces several identical buyers. The quality of the good may be low or high, and is the seller's private information. The seller has strictly convex preferences that satisfy a single-crossing property. Buyers compete by posting menus of nonexclusive contracts, so that...