We design a non-clairvoyant dynamic mechanism under budget and ex-post individual rationality constraints that is dynamic incentive-compatible and achieves non-trivial revenue performance, even without any knowledge about the future. In particular, our dynamic mechanism obtains a constant...

We introduce a new family of dynamic mechanisms that restricts sellers from using future distributional knowledge. Since the allocation and pricing of each auction period do not depend on the type distributions of future periods, we call this family of dynamic mechanisms non-clairvoyant.We...

Governments must usually take policy decisions with an imperfect knowledge of the economic actors' type or the actors' effort level. These issues are addressed within the framework of classic adverse selection or moral hazard models. I discuss in this paper how would the government’s and the...

I study the interaction between optimal procurement and outsourcing of production in small industries. First, two sellers decide about outsourcing. By outsourcing, a seller loses information about the costs of producing to his supplier. Then the buyer designs the procurement mechanism and...

Consider a mechanism design setting in which agents acquire costly information about an unknown, payoff-relevant state of nature. Information gathering is covert. We investigate conditions under which (i) efficient implementation and (ii) full surplus extraction are Bayesian incentive compatible...

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...

I study a mechanism design problem in which a designer allocates a single good to one of several agents, and the mechanism is followed by an aftermarket -- a post-mechanism game played between the agent who acquired the good and third-party market participants. The designer has preferences over...

The Introduction to the Symposium Issue on “Dynamic Contract and Mechanism Design” of the Journal of Economic Theory provides an overview of the dynamic mechanism design literature. We then introduce the papers that are contained in the Symposium issue and finally conclude by discussing...

We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire (covert) information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists which provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient...

We consider a general mechanism design setting where each agent can acquire covert information before participating in the mechanism. The central question is whether a mechanism exists which provides the efficient incentives for information acquisition ex-ante and implements the efficient...