We characterize the profit-maximizing mechanism for repeatedly selling a non-durable good in continuous time. The valuation of each agent is private information and changes over time. At the time of contracting every agent privately observes his initial type which influences the evolution of his...

We characterize the revenue-maximizing mechanism for time separable allocation problems in continuous time. The willingness-to-pay of each agent is private information and changes over time.We derive the dynamic revenue-maximizing mechanism, analyze its qualitative structure and frequently...

We characterize the profit-maximizing mechanism for repeatedly selling a non-durable good in continuous time. The valuation of each agent is private information and changes over time. At the time of contracting every agent privately observes his initial type which influences the evolution of his...

We consider two players facing identical discrete-time bandit problems with a safe and a risky arm. In any period, the risky arm yields either a success or a failure, and the first success reveals the risky arm to dominate the safe one. When payoffs are public information, the ensuing free-rider...

This paper introduces a contest model in which each player decides when to stop a privately observed Brownian motion with drift and incurs costs depending on his stopping time. The player who stops his process at the highest value wins a prize. Applications of the model include procurement...

We consider the optimal taxation of a good which exhibits a negative externality, in a setting where agents differ in their value for the good, their disutility for the externality and their value for money, and the planner observes neither. Pigouvian taxation is the unique Pareto efficient...

We establish convergence of beliefs and actions in a class of one-dimensional learning settings in which the agent’s model is misspecified, she chooses actions endogenously, and the actions affect how she misinterprets information. The crucial assumptions of our model are that the state and...

We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary decisions as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant cost per unit time for gathering information. We show that...

We provide a tractable model of competition in rank-order contests with general prize structures. A leading example of such a situation is the competition between fund managers whose compensation depends on how well they performed relative to their peers. We analyze their trading behavior In a...

We study learning and information acquisition by a Bayesian agent who is misspecified in the sense that his prior belief assigns probability zero to the true state of the world. In our model, at each instant the agent takes an action and observes the corresponding payoff, which is the sum of the...