A risk-neutral principal considers hiring one agent to improve a valuable, observable outcome. Who to hire? How to motivate? In this paper, the principal designs an incentive contract that pays according to the realized outcome and sells the contract to an agent through an auction. The paper...

We model new experience goods in the context of dynamic mechanism design. These are goods for which an agent is unsure of her valuation but can learn it through consumption experience. We consider a dynamic environment with a single buyer and seller in which contracting occurs over T periods,...

We consider a general scheme to construct Bayesian incentive compatible mechanisms using a suitable 'variable mechanism parametrization.' The key idea is to perturb a given direct mechanism, which might not be truth revealing, introducing sufficient variability as a function of agents'...

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...

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...

We study a principal-agent model. The parties are symmetrically informed at first; the principal then designs the screening mechanism and, concurrently, the process by which the agent learns his type. Because the agent can opt out of the mechanism ex post, it must leave him with nonnegative...

Dynamic mechanisms are a powerful technique in designing revenue-maximizing repeated auctions. Despite their strength, these types of mechanisms have not been widely adopted in practice for several reasons, e.g., for their complexity, and for their sensitivity to the accuracy of predicting...

The common-support assumption of future type distributions is standard in the dynamic mechanism design literature (e.g., Baron and Besanko, 1984, Courty and Li, 2000, Eső and Szentes, 2007, Krähmer and Strausz, 2011, and Pavan, Segal, and Toikka, 2014). It is widely perceived that the...

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...

Principal-agent relationships between the supervisory board and the management of bidding firms in auctions are widespread in high-stakes auctions. Often only the agent has information about the value of the objects being sold. The board wants to maximize the profit, but the management wants to...