This paper explores the sale of an object to an ambiguity averse buyer. We show that the seller can increase his profit by using an ambiguous mechanism. That is, the seller can benefit from hiding certain features of the mechanism that he has committed to from the agent. We then characterize the...

The price mechanism is fundamental to economics but difficult to reconcile with incentive compatibility and individual rationality. We introduce a double clock auction for a homogeneous good market with multidimensional private information and multiunit traders that is deficit-free, ex post...

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...

Fees are omnipresent in markets but, with few exceptions, are omitted in economic models-such as Double Auctions-of these markets. Allowing for general fee structures, we show that their impact on incentives and efficiency in large Double Auctions hinges on whether the fees are homogeneous (as,...

Under appropriate assumptions (private values and uniform punishments), the Nash equilibria of a Bayesian repeated game without discounting are payoff-equivalent to tractable, completely revealing, equilibria and can be achieved as interim cooperative solutions of the initial Bayesian game. This...

This paper studies a model of mechanism design with transfers where agents' preferences need not be quasilinear. In such a model, (1) we characterize dominant strategy incentive compatible mechanisms using a monotonicity property; (2) we establish a revenue uniqueness result: for every dominant...

We study optimal mechanisms for a utilitarian designer who seeks to assign a finite number of goods to a group of ex ante heterogeneous agents with unit demand. The agents have heterogeneous marginal utilities of money, which may naturally arise in environments where agents have different wealth...

The conflict between Pareto optimality and incentive compatibility, that is, the fact that some Pareto optimal (efficient) allocations are not incentive compatible is a fundamental fact in information economics, mechanism design and general equilibrium with asymmetric information. This important...