I study the ex-ante efficient allocation of a set of quality-heterogeneous objects to a number of heterogeneous risk-neutral agents. Agents have independent private values, which represent the maximum cost they are willing to sustain to obtain an object of unitary quality. The designer faces a...

We study alternative methods of assigning scarce resources to individuals who may be liquidity-constrained. Selling the resources via auctions is increasingly popular, but that method may produce an inefficient allocation when agents are liquidity constrained. A simple non-market scheme such as...

We present a new dynamic auction for procurement problems where payments are bounded by a hard budget constraint and money does not enter the procurer's objective function.

A number of identical objects is allocated to a set of privately informed agents. Agents have linear utility in money. The designer wants to assign objects to agents that possess specific traits, but the allocation can only be conditioned on the willingness to pay and on observable...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a short-listed set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer’s problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer’s...

This paper shows that public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals consume both public and private goods. The government's involvement in the provision of private goods provides it with information about individuals' private...

February 1998 <p> In smooth exchange economies with a continuum of agents, any Walrasian mechanism is Pareto efficient, individually rational, anonymous, and strategy-proof.  Barberà and Jackson's (1995) results imply that no such efficient mechanism is the limit of resource-balanced,...</p>

We study Bayesian mechanism design in situations where agents' information may be multi-dimensional, concentrating on mechanisms that lead to efficient allocations. Our main result is that a generalization of the well-known Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism maximizes the planner's "revenue'' among...

Software is a potentially excludable public good. It is possible, at some cost, to exclude non-paying users from its consumption by using copyright law or technological restraints. Licensing the software under proprietary license terms makes of it a private good, licensing it under the BSD does...

This paper analyzes the relationship between opportunity costs of waiting and bribery in rationing by waiting situations. Assuming that a uniform waiting time clears the market for any given bribe and the bureaucrat chooses a bribe to maximize profit, the market equilibrium is characterized in...