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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

When partnerships come to an end, partners must find a way to efficiently reallocate the commonly owned assets to those who value them the most. This requires that the aforementioned members possess enough financial resources to buy out the others’ shares. I investigate ex post efficient...

Neeman (2004) and Heifetz and Neeman (2006) have shown that, in auctions with incomplete information about payoffs, full surplus extraction is only possible if agents’ beliefs about other agents are fully informative about their own payoff parameters. They argue that the set of...

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...

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...

We study optimal selling strategies of a seller who is poorly informed about the buyer’s value for the object. When the maxmin seller only knows that the mean of the distribution of the buyer's valuations belongs to some interval then nature can keep him to payoff zero no matter how much...