A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a short-listed set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer's objective function,...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a short-listed set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer's objective function,...

We present a new dynamic auction for procurement problems where payments are bounded by a hard budget constraint and money does not enter the procurer's objective function.

The procurement of complex projects is often plagued by large cost overruns. One important reason for these additional costs are flaws in the initial design. If the project is procured with a price-only auction, sellers who spotted some of the flaws have no incentive to reveal them early. Each...

In many markets, sellers advertise their good with an asking price. This is a price at which the seller is willing to take his good off the market and trade immediately, though it is understood that a buyer can submit an offer below the asking price and that this offer may be accepted if the...

For an incomplete-information model of public-good provision with interim participation constraints, we show that efficient outcomes can be approximated, with approximately full surplus extraction, when there are many agents and each agent is informationally small. The result holds even if...

A budget-constrained buyer wants to purchase items from a shortlisted set. Items are differentiated by observable quality and sellers have private reserve prices for their items. The buyer's problem is to select a subset of maximal quality. Money does not enter the buyer's objective function,...

I study the properties of optimal long-term contracts in an environment in which the agent's type evolves stochastically over time. The model stylizes a buyer-seller relationship but the results apply quite naturally to many contractual situations including regulation and optimal...

We consider a licensing mechanism for process innovations that combines a license auction with royalty contracts to those who lose the auction. Firms' bids are dual signals of their cost reductions: the winning bid signals the own cost reduction to rival oligopolists, whereas the losing bid...