This paper shows that a monopolistic certifying party can have incentives to disclose revealing information about the agent he is certifying. Using a three-person game-theoretic model and allowing certificate users (buyers) to have noisy estimates of the quality level of the agent being...

I model access to influence as a two-sided matching market between a continuum of experts and a finite number of gatekeepers under sequential directed search. Real-world examples include academic publishing, venture capitalism or political agenda setting. Uniqueness of the resulting equilibrium...

We develop a novel theory of real estate foreclosure auctions, which have the special feature that the lender acts as a seller for low and as a buyer for high prices. The theory yields several empirically testable predictions concerning the strategic behavior of the agents, both under symmetric...

We analyze the doping behavior of heterogeneous athletes in an environment of private information. In a n-player strategic game, modeled as an all-pay auction, each athlete has private information about his actual physical ability and choses the amount of performance-enhancing drugs. The use of...

We address the scheduling problem of reordering an existing queue into its efficient order through trade. To that end, we consider individually rational and balanced budget direct and indirect mechanisms. We show that this class of mechanisms allows us to form efficient queues provided that...

Potential bidders respond to a seller's choice of auction mechanism for a common-value or affiliated-values asset by endogenous decisions whether to incur an information-acquisition cost (and observe a private estimate), or forgo competing. Privately informed participants decide whether to incur...

In many auctions, matching between the bidder and seller raises the value of the contract for both parties. However, information about the quality of the match may be incomplete. We consider the case in which each bidder observes the quality of his match with the seller but the seller does not...

In the context of first-price auctions with asymmetrically informed bidders, we show that risk aversion not only increases a player's bid, but also makes him less sensitive to the probability that other bidders are informed about his private valuation

This paper examines the effects of disclosing the actual number of bidders in contests with endogenous stochastic entry. I study a standard all-pay auction in which bidders' valuations are commonly known but their participation decisions private. Each potential bidder has to incur an entry cost...

This paper explores the buyer-optimal information structures in a monopolistic screening context with nonlinear production technology. It shows that the buyer's optimal surplus may increase even when the production cost becomes more uncertain or when the efficient surplus decreases. Under a...