I compare certification and self-regulation, two widely used quality assurance mechanisms in markets where consumers do not observe the quality of goods. Certification is a mechanism in which an external firm offers a certificate to producers who undergo a testing procedure, issues the...

Having a formal understanding of what various institutions represent should be important. There are few economic variables which can accumulate over time (and give us what i call as "state utility"). All these institutions, like education, health, social (like caste system, dowry etc.), do is...

The problem of optimally designing information for multiple agents who interact in a game can be formulated as a linear program. We explore its dual representation and show that it provides a novel perspective and new economic insights into the information-design problem. Through the lens of the...

Mediator proposals can accelerate agreement and increase welfare even if the mediator is entirely uninformed. We demonstrate this by adding random mediation to the Cramton (1992) bargaining model. Mediation increases welfare by pooling types, which reduces signaling costs. When mediation is...

We study a Bayesian game of two-sided incomplete information in which an agent, who owns a project of unknown quality, considers proposing it to an evaluator, who has the choice of whether or not to accept it. There exist two distinct tiers of evaluation that differ in the benefits they deliver...

Microcredit, a financial tool providing uncollateralized loans to low-income individuals, has seen a shift from joint-liability (JL) to individual liabil- ity (IL) lending models. This article tests a theory explaining this shift, focusing on borrowers matching into groups exposed to similar...

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...

The paper extends the optimal delegation framework pioneered by Holmström (1977, 1984) to a dynamic environment where, at the outset, the agent privately knows his ability to interpret decision relevant private information received later on. We show that any mechanism can be implemented by a...

We introduce intention-based social preferences into a Bayesian mechanism design framework. We first show that, under common knowledge of social preferences, any tension between material efficiency, incentive compatibility, and voluntary participation can be resolved. Hence, famous impossibility...

We introduce intention-based social preferences into a mechanism design framework with independent private values and quasilinear payoffs. For the case where the designer has no information about the intensity of social preferences, we provide conditions under which mechanisms which have been...