Affiliation has been a prominent assumption in the study of economic models with statistical dependence. Despite its large number of applications, especially in auction theory, affiliation has limitations that are important to be aware of. This paper shows that affiliation is a restrictive...

This paper studies the degrees of equilibrium competition in three common forms of auctions with costly participation, and shows that, when bidders' valuation distribution is concave, there is a simple condition to rank the equilibrium competition of those auctions. It also investigates how the...

We propose a theory based on the firm's hiring behavior that rationalizes the observed decline of callback rates for an interview, exit rates, and reemployment wages over unemployment duration. We build a directed search model with symmetric incomplete information on worker types and...

It is a well-established insight from the contest literature that greater heterogeneity between bidders tends to reduce the players' incentives to bid. Disclosure of information about bidders' types, e.g., revealing bidders' bid history, is one source of heterogeneity. This paper characterizes...

This paper presents five empirical tests of the popular modeling abstraction that assumes bids from online auctions with proxy bidding can be analyzed “as if” they were bids from a second price sealed-bid auction. The tests rely on observations of the magnitudes and timings of the top two...

A principal incentivizes a team of agents to work by privately offering them bonuses contingent on team success. We study the principal's optimal incentive scheme that implements work as a unique equilibrium. This scheme leverages rank uncertainty to address strategic uncertainty. Each agent is...

We solve the non-linear income tax program for a rank-dependent social welfare function à la Yaari, expressing the trade-off between size and inequality using the Gini or related families of positional indices. The key idea is that when agents optimize and absent bunching, ranks in the actual...

We analyze the design of a mechanism to extract a ranking of individuals according to a unidimensional characteristic, such as ability or need. Individuals, connected on a social network, only have local information about the ranking. We show that a planner can construct an ex post incentive...