I analyze the incentive for costly information collection in a multi-unit commonvalue uniform-price auction in which bidders submit demand functions. I show that so long as there are some bidders who have a very high cost of information collection, even if there are a large number of other...

We propose a simple theory of trade credit and prepayment. A downstream firm trades off inventory holding costs against lost sales. Lost final sales impose a negative externality on the upstream firm. We show that allowing the downstream firm to pay with a delay, an arrangement known as “trade...

Multi-unit common value uniform price auctions with demand function bids are in widespread use. I analyze this auction when there is an informed bidder and other uninformed bidders. In such auctions it is easy to construct equilibria in which uninformed bidders earn a positive payoff by free...

We characterize the optimal selling mechanism in a scenario where similar goods are sold to “high end” buyers through a posted price and to “lower end” buyers through an auction. We show that the optimal mechanism involves an auction which is a standard optimal auction (Myerson (1981))...

If entrepreneurs have private information about factors influencing the outcome of an investment, individual lending is inefficient. The literature emphasizes improvements through non-market organizations that harness local information through peer monitoring. I investigate the complementary...

The current debate on the new Basel Accord gives rise to a natural question about the appropriate form of capital regulation. We construct a simple framework to analyze this issue. In our model the risk carried by a bank as well as managerial risk preference are a bank’s private information....

We study alternative mechanisms facing adverse selection and moral hazard, as well as the problems of collusion and free-riding, which are often ignored in the literature. We derive the optimal monitoring mechanism and show that it solves free riding and collusion problems. However, with...

In the standardindependentprivate values (IPV)model, each bidder’s beliefs about the values of any other bidder is represented by a unique prior. In this paper we relax this assumption and studythe question of auction design in an IPV setting characterizedby ambiguity: bidders have an...

Online auctions with a fixed end-time often experience a sharp increase in bidding towards the end despite using a proxy-bidding format. We provide a novel explanation of this phenomenon under private values. We study a correlated private values environment in which the seller bids in her own...

If entrepreneurs have private information about factors influencing the outcome of an investment, individual lending is inefficient. The literature typically offers solutions based on the assumption of full peer information to solve adverse selection problems and peer monitoring to solve moral...