A single unit of a good is to be sold by auction to one of two buyers. The good has either a high value or a low value, with known prior probabilities. The designer of the auction knows the prior over values but is uncertain about the correct model of the buyers' beliefs. The designer evaluates...

We study auction design when bidders have a pure common value equal to the maximum of their independent signals. In the revenue maximizing mechanism, each bidder makes a payment that is independent of his signal and the allocation discriminates in favor of bidders with lower signals. We provide...

We explore the impact of private information in sealed-bid first-price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning-bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information...

We explore the impact of private information in sealed bid first price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information...

We explore the impact of private information in sealed-bid first-price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning-bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information...

We study games in which multiple principals influence the choice of a privately-informed agent by offering action-contingent payments. We characterize the equilibrium allocation set as the maximizers of an endogenous aggregate virtual-surplus program. The aggregate maximand for every equilibrium...

We present a Theory of Contracts under costly enforcement in the context of a dynamic relationship between an uninformed buyer and a seller who is privately informed on his persistent cost at the outset. Public enforcement relies on remedies for breach. Private enforcement comes from severing...

An aggregate game is a normal-form game with the property that each player's payoff is a function of only his own strategy and an aggregate of the strategy profile of all players. Such games possess properties that can often yield simple characterizations of equilibrium aggregates without re-...

We characterize revenue maximizing auctions when the bidders are intermediaries who wish to resell the good. The bidders have differential information about their common resale opportunities: each bidder privately observes an independent draw of a resale opportunity, and the highest signal is a...

We explore the impact of private information in sealed-bid first-price auctions. For a given symmetric and arbitrarily correlated prior distribution over values, we characterize the lowest winning-bid distribution that can arise across all information structures and equilibria. The information...