Auctions are among the oldest economic institutions in place---they have been used since antiquity to sell a wide variety of goods, and their basic form has remained unchanged. In this dissertation, I explore the efficiency of common auctions when values are interdependent---the value to a...

Many important phenomena (electoral competition, R&D races, lobbying) are instances of multiple simultaneous contests with unconditional commitment of limited resources. Specifically, the following game is analyzed in the first chapter. Two players compete in a number of simultaneous contests....

This thesis applies mechanism design to explore the roles of outside and inside money in achieving optimal allocations. Two chapters use settings that are related to random-matching models. The third uses an overlapping generations setting. In all three, a critical role is played by assumptions...

CHAPTER 1: Immiserizing Deindustrialization: A Dynamic Trade Model with Credit ConstraintsIn this essay I develop an open economy dynamic model with bequests and credit constraints. The agricultural sector uses only labor, the industrial sector needs an indivisible investment. Under autarky,...

Efficient allocation of scarce resources is one of the central themes in economics. The essays in this thesis approach two aspects of this problem. In the first essay I consider the problem of the efficient provision of a public good with congestion in a setting with asymmetric information....

[This item is a preserved copy. To view the original, visit http://econtheory.org/] Strategy-proofness, requiring that truth-telling be a dominant strategy, is a standard concept in social choice theory. However, this concept has serious drawbacks. In particular, many strategy-proof mechanisms...