We derive several implications of incentive compatibility in general (i.e., not necessarily quasilinear) environments. Building on Kos and Messner (2013), we provide a (partial) characterization of incentive compatible mechanisms.

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...

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...

We consider mechanism design in contexts in which agents exhibit bounded depth of reasoning (level k ) instead of rational expectations. We use simple direct mechanisms, in which agents report only first-order beliefs. While level 0 agents are assumed to be truth tellers, level k agents...

We give a sufficient condition on the type space for revenue equivalence when the set of social alternatives consists of probability distributions over a finite set. Types are identified with real-valued functions that assign valuations to elements of this finite set, and the type space is...

We study mechanisms for environments in which only some of the agents are directly connected to a mechanism designer and the other agents can participate in a mechanism only through the connected agents' referrals. In such environments, the mechanism designer and agents may have different...

We characterize the boundaries of the set of transfers (extremal transfers) implementing a given allocation rule without imposing any assumptions on the agentʼs type space or utility function besides quasi-linearity. Exploiting the concept of extremal transfers allows us to obtain an exact...