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...

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...

This paper studies how information control affects incentives for collusion and optimal organizational structures in principal-supervisor-agent relationships. I consider a model in which the principal designs the supervisor's signal on the productive agent's private information and the...

This paper develops a methodology for characterizing expected revenue from auctions when 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 prove by construction that ex post incentive compatible mechanisms exist in a private goods setting with multi-dimensional signals and interdependent values. The mechanism shares features with the generalized Vickrey auction of one-dimensional signal models. The construction implies that for...

A crucial assumption in the optimal auction literature is that each bidder's valuation is known to be drawn from a unique distribution. In this paper we study the optimal auction problem allowing for ambiguity about the distribution of valuations. Agents may be ambiguity averse (modeled using...

We give a sufficient condition on the type space for revenue equivalence when the set of social alternatives consists of probability distributions over a finite set. Types are identified with real-valued functions that assign valuations to elements of this finite set, and the type space is...

We study a problem of optimal auction design in the realistic case in which the players can collude both on the way they play in the auction and on their participation decisions. Despite the fact that the principal's opportunities for extracting payments from the agents in such a situation are...

The literature on competing auctions offers a model where sellers compete for buyers by setting reserve prices freely. An important outstanding conjecture (e.g. Peters and Severinov (1997)) is that the sellers post prices close to their marginal costs when the market becomes large. This...

We consider Bayesian incentive-compatible mechanisms with independent types and either private values or interdependent values that satisfy a form of "congruence." We show that in these settings, interim participation constraints are satisfied when the status quo is the randomized allocation...