Why do women hit the glass ceiling? Women are hired, but then fail to rise through the ranks. We propose a novel explanation for this pattern, namely preference- and belief-free discrimination. In our setting, an employer can increase effort by inducing differential value distributions for a...

We study mechanisms for environments in which only some of the agents are directly connected to a mechanism designer and the other agents can participate in a mechanism only through the connected agents' referrals. In such environments, the mechanism designer and agents may have different...

The paper addresses the mechanism design problem of eliciting truthful information from a committee of informed experts who collude in their information disclosure strategies. It is shown that under fairly general conditions full information disclosure is possible if and only if the induced...

We consider a dynamic auction environment with a long-lived seller and short-lived buyers mediated by a third party. A mediator has incomplete information about traders' values and selects an auction mechanism to maximize her expected revenue. We characterize mediator-optimal mechanisms and show...

Standard economic models of groundwater management impose restrictive assumptions regarding perfect transmissivity (i.e., the aquifer behaves as a bathtub), no external effects of groundwater stocks, observability of individual extraction rates, and/or homogenous agents. In this article, we...

Global warming caused by accumulation of emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) is a public bad, addressing which requires collective action by all the countries of the world. Under the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), most countries have negotiated the Kyoto Protocol for GHG...