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 the optimal mechanism for a seller (she) that sells, in a sequence of periods, an indivisible object per period to the same buyer (he). Buyer's willingness to pay remains constant along time and is his private information. The seller can commit to the current period mechanism...

This paper studies the optimal mechanisms for a seller with imperfect commitment who puts up for sale one individual unit per period to a single buyer in a dynamic game. The buyer's willingness to pay remains constant over time and is his private information. In this setting, the seller cannot...

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...

The paper reviews models of the physician-patient relationship to derive testable hypotheses about the relation between health, demand for medical services and patient's compliance. The models imply that in addition to existing information asymmetries the actions that physician and patient...

McAfee and Reny (1992) have given a necessary and sufficient condition for full surplus extraction in naive type spaces with a continuum of payoff types. We generalize their characterization to arbitrary abstract type spaces and to the universal type space and show that in each setting, full...

I consider settings with rich private information—an agent's type may include private information other than just his preferences. In such settings, I identify a necessary condition for obviously strategy-proof implementation of social choice rules. I consider applications to strict...

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...